If you’re a criminal I will not use any application you write

> Call criminal behavior for what it is; don’t pretend it’s not criminal. If we all start identifying Big Tech for what it truly is, a band of stalkers, perhaps we can start changing the future.

I have a hard time taking this article seriously with hysterical statements like this.

This is peak virtue signaling. It's a hysterical piece full of exaggeration. Its sole purpose is to make readers who agree feel good, and otherwise change nobody's mind. The strawman argument is "nobody who likes stalking would use big tech, right???", which is so laughably bad that it seems more likely that this piece was written by someone satirizing anti-big tech attitudes than an actual believer.

> If you’re a criminal, I will not use any application you write.

Cool story, but I have bad news about the people who contribute to Linux, which you’re apparently into.

> For bizarre reasons people throw away all their standard morals that are nothing short of common sense in “the real world” when it comes to tech. It’s as if standing 10 inches from a screen alters reality itself.

It’s not just tech. Well, not just tech with screens, anyway. Consider the behavior of many car drivers. Or your consumption of goods gathered or manufactured by very poor people in other countries, in unfortunate conditions. When you don’t have to interact with people directly, it tends to minimize the social constraints that usually keep people in check.

While I appreciate the author's argument against being stalked, or giving information to criminals, they ignore the core culprit: information-as-a-service. Most importantly, the author presents a "No True Scotsman" argument around who should develop software and why. 'Mark' and his 'stalking' system may have optimized it, but he sure didn't invent it. The author conveniently forgets to mention that information is a two-way steet. Trust is a hard problem.

> Every reasonable person would act against stalkers like Mark and his cronies. Let’s apply this logic to the digital realm.

The author assumes that a digital persona matches their physical persona. This is not the case. Plenty of people curate content that does not match their personal beliefs, purely for economic benefit. Are they criminals?

>If you’re a criminal, I will not use any application you write.

Author probably has not considered that these writings may result in a defamation case against them, if someone views them as a valuable prospect. If the ruling works against them, does that make them a criminal immediately unworthy of their engineering contribution? If so, a number of reverse engineers who skirt these laws every day would like to have a word with the author.

Calling someone a "criminal" means he was found guilty, in a court of law, of violating a such-and-such law. What laws were violated here? If the claim is someone is a criminal, the burden of proof is on you to prove it because it's a significant claim. Simply finding someone disagreeable does not make him a criminal.

Furthermore, if you prefer judging software by who wrote them rather than what they are, then I have no confidence that your judgments will be valuable. I'm pretty sure there was a Latin phrase (or something similar) for this behaviour, judging a work by the merits of its creator rather than its own.

EDIT: Didn't realize this was presumably submitted by the author himself. Rephrasing as appropriate with that in mind.

I think I need to rethink the way I wrote this article, because the wrong message is being understood. Clearly I have done a bad job at writing it. I should rewrite this article entirely. Thank you for the feedback

I think I agree with the author's sentiment and final conclusions, but I very much disagree with some of the language used.

The author never defines "criminal". I can only hope they don't literally mean "someone who breaks a law". From jaywalking in Singapore to being gay in Iran, plenty of people meet that criteria, for reasons that don't necessarily mean any software they produce cannot (or should not) be trusted.

Whether or not you are a criminal is often political. To write off "criminals" in this way without even acknowledging any of this seems very counterproductive to the larger fight for rights the author is clamoring for. I am sure a simple "in the context of this article, I mean [this and that] when I use the term criminal" would be enough to clarify.

> Would you deem Mark an upstanding citizen or report his insidious behavior? His actions mirror a stalker’s obsession, yet he commands a virtual kingdom. Now, transpose this image onto the face of Big Tech, those companies that liken themselves to friendly community builders. Is it any less sinister?

It may not be any less sinister, but there is a qualitative difference between having a single person stalk you, and having an apparatus in place that automatically reacts to what it observes of your behavior. Stalkers often set up such apparatus, and that should be/remain illegal in that context. Yet I don't think taking shots at Sentry or haphazardly reducing them to privacy violations is useful. Nor is is useful to treat a system (largely digital) the same way you would treat a person.

> So why does the situation change when you’re talking about billion-dollar conglomerates in the tech industry? Why do we laugh it off or shrug when it’s technology that’s tracking us?

Technology on its own doesn't want anything, whereas stalkers do. Again, I suspect the author's intent here is to highlight that there is someone on the "other end" of this tech that is actually viewing and using the tracking data.

I just can't understand what this is being written for, in the end, unless it's mostly for the emotional release or catharsis. If it is the latter, then I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong here. If this is intended to reach an audience and maybe push for change, however, it fails pretty flatly to me. It's a call-out of the unconvinced that ends up preaching to the choir more than anything else. As I would consider myself part of that choir, I don't find it that upsetting to read. At the same time, I don't get much from reading it, either.

The site is called "Escape Big Tech".

The article seems to be trying to draw some equivalence between big tech and criminality. I think it is fair to say that criminality as this article describes it is widespread, and actual criminal behaviour is often in small operations, the whole premise collapses.

The issue I have with this "they're stalking you" argument is that they don't say why this is worse than the benefits they gain from using these tools.

Okay, so Facebook knows your preferences and buying patterns to an exacting degree. We can agree on that.

Why is this bad for someone who just wants to keep up with friends and family?

How is avoiding this tracking worse than giving up Facebook and, in so doing, a large part of your social network?

How is this worse than the tracking that credit card companies and cellular providers have been doing for decades?

What if they don't care about seeing a few ads? (Very few people care about the ads.)

error logging software helps software teams track the occurrence and frequency of errors together with the context of the browser/runner and the software stack, with the aim of reproducibility. It’s analogous to recounting the problem with the latest online purchase to customer support.

That should probably not be in the same class of analogies as a group of people following you shopping downtown noting every action you take.

I admit there’s the area in between where sports coaches record the performance of athletes in order to improve positive financial outcomes (telemetry)

I lost brain cells reading this

Homer on the couch: Everyone here is an idiot but me

Is this supposed to be satire ???