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Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

The difference between "ethics" and "security and compliance" is that the latter is something that hits inside the company, while the former usually hits outside of the company.

Poor security practices harm your teams, your data, and usually you make moderate savings at best. Poor ethics "only" harm your customers while making bank for the company.

This is the real problem with ethics in a large corporation. You're not saying "no" to another team, you're saying no to large profits, you're saying no to the company's leadership. That is what never works.

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> The difference between "ethics" and "security and compliance" is that the latter is something that hits inside the company, while the former usually hits outside of the company.

I don’t agree with this. Data breaches affect customers more than businesses. If your point were true, we’d see fewer breaches. Plus not all breaches are a result of software engineering teams. For example product managers sharing customer details.

I’ve managed plenty of teams where I’ve had to instil the importance of secure best practices at all stages of development. So it’s definitely not something inherently important to all people who work in organisations.

Just like with ethics. It’s very easy to dismiss either as an inconvenience if you don’t instil the right company culture at all levels of the organisation.

This is why European financial organisations have such strict onboarding procedures to teach new hires about fraud, bribery and other financial misconduct even for issues that are ethical grey rather than outright illegal. Similarly many organisations will have onboarding procedures to teach new hires their security best practices too

I think we're both thinking of different examples and drawing wider conclusions. I'm thinking of a company losing the data that makes it money, you're thinking of losing the customer data and thus their trust. Probably equally valid points of view.

The lack of ethics hugely contributes to companies collecting more and more user data that they normally shouldn't have. This makes the data a more attractive target.

> If your point were true, we’d see fewer breaches.

But this doesn't follow. There are way more factors at play that influence the number of attacks and the number of successes. Companies hold more and more data with ever higher value (so more liability), and hacking tools and hacker determination advanced faster than defensive measures. The result is expected and the solution isn't only "more security", but also "hold less data".

While security is a double edged sword, ethics had been proven to be very single edged. History shows that for startups and large companies alike, the lack of ethics is actually a competitive advantage for the company.

> I think we're both thinking of different examples and drawing wider conclusions. I'm thinking of a company losing the data that makes it money, you're thinking of losing the customer data and thus their trust. Probably equally valid points of view.

But in most businesses, the data that makes the company money is the customer data. And even when it isn’t, the customer data is just as, if not more so, important to keep secure and compliant. So my point stands.

HN can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber where people are like us just assume that organisations inherently care about security because we do. But that’s not always the de facto. Getting to that point takes company wide effort. And I’ve been that person who’s had to push for such changes to the organisation.

> But this doesn't follow.

Fair point. I was being overly reductive.

This is exactly why ethics doesnt work, and it is why laws work. If ethics worked, we'd have no need for laws.

Slavery ended with gunfire not hugs.

Actually, in my country, we made the revolution with flowers not gunfire.

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