> “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them”
> “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”
I'm against what FB did, and it is still Zuck's responsibility, but let's take a fake company as an example. Say I'm your manager, and I ask you to start learning more about what our competition is doing. If you used publicly available info (like news articles or other media, even their engineering blog), OK great -- but if you decided to snoop their traffic, which only went between that competitor's servers and their users, I wouldn't be OK with that. Perhaps you did something unethical, but also I'd be responsible bc I hired you.
How do you prevent this sort of thing, especially at a huge company? Especially a huge tech company, where I believe lots of tech workers tend to specialize in tech and often lack soft skills/ability to think about the bigger non-technical picture. For example, "oh shit, we can't actually read this data w/o the customer's consent."