Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

It's not ridiculous - at all. Facebook is the kind of company that wants to control their market and their platform. The Oculus Rift was an exciting piece of tech that was untied to any platform, giving an open opportunity for software developers to explore VRUI. Now, it gives Facebook the opportunity to explore VRUI.

Of course, I'm afraid they're going to tie the hardware to their awful, invasive Web platform. I'd be upset if it were Google, but Facebook is about as bottom-of-the-ethical-barrel as it gets.

View on HN

Well, not sure if bottom of the ethical barrel, necessarily.

It's just that their (creativity, intelligence, innovation, drivers of progress) / (cash they own) ratio is mindblowingly low. And this is due to both the denominator and the numerator sides.

Facebook is the new Microsoft, basically. Low on creativity and innovation, high on cash, riding to success a huge wave of demand that would have carried anybody else who just happened to be there at the right time.

> bottom-of-the-ethical-barrel

Again, this is silly sensationalist thinking -- companies aren't people capable of "good" or "evil" choices. If they were, I'd note that Facebook was one of the only companies NOT conspiring to deflate the wages of half of the people that visit this site.

(Note: I don't work for FB -- I just rail against silly hyperbolic thinking.)

Groups of people are capable of collectively "good" or "evil" choices, and we often regard collective decisions in moral terms.

I'd argue that Facebook has made a lot of decisions that exploit users in pursuit of making more money and acquiring more personal data -- and that we don't have to be happy a technology platform with a lot of promise is now tied to a company with a record of making such decisions.

I won't welcome a Facebook platform in to my life the same way I would a standalone piece of technology, precisely because of the kind of decisions made by Facebook.

I normally agree with you, but I really believe Facebook's model - hosting people's personal life in a corporate database - is wrong, flatly wrong. It'd be wrong for anybody, but they're the most active pushers. Friend lists, personal photos, relationships, messages, even though users gave them up freely, it was wrong to take them.

IT ethics means that you use your expertise to actively protect sensitive information. They don't do that, and there can be / will be / are consequences. If anybody could have pushed an effective self-hosting platform, it's them, but they haven't.

They are at the bottom of the ethical barrel.

While I tend to agree with your ethical stand point, I think it's unfair to blame them for not pushing a self hosting platform. Without first gathering the personal info of the users they would never had the clout to push anything. They had to obtain a large level of popularity in order to push anything.

That's a fair point - think of all the attempts to displace them (cough diaspora). But that's also why the onus falls onto them now, right?

companies aren't people capable of "good" or "evil" choices

Their directors certainly are. A friend's mother works in a high-level consultancy that is known for turning down lucrative-but-unethical projects. I've worked in a company where the CEO would always try to find a win-win, even if it cost the company financially. I've also worked in a company where the CEO/majority owner vociferously abused the directors when he wasn't allowed a vote when they were voting on his own payrise (the directors saying that it was illegal to do so). That company also played a lot of three-card monte with FDA auditors.

Companies can behave ethically; just because they're not an organism doesn't mean that they're not under the control of something that can make those decisions. A car is just a lump of matter. Can't do anything by itself. But stick a human into it, and it can do all sorts of things, from the mundane (collecting groceries) to the charitable (distributing meals) to the unethical (hit-and-run). A company is the same.

Add into this that Facebook has been shown to be openly selling fraudulent products, and it doesn't make it sound like Facebook is the innocent you're implying. Crack open youtube and search for 'veritasium facebook', there are a couple of videos - Facebook is essentially selling advertising with fake impressions.

It's really not sensationalist at all.

Facebook is run by a man who got rich on selling private data to advertisers, and then used his billions to buy all the mansions surrounding his own mansion so that he could protect his privacy.

Zuckerberg is scum and this is a sad day for any fan of the Oculus.

to be fair, put in zuckerberg's position, I would do the exact same thing.

the last thing I would want is for my house to be surrounded by people who won bidding wars just to own property near me.

it's not like he bought all the surrounding lots and kicked the residents out; iirc he actually went out of his way to essentially set up a pseudo reverse mortgage for one older couple.

>the last thing I would want is for my house to be surrounded by people who won bidding wars just to own property near me.

That's hypocrisy. He's repeatedly gone on record stating that he believes peoples' lives should be fully open and shared.

But he doesn't want his own life to be open and shared?

I don't like the guy's company, I've never met the guy; but I don't think you're even trying, or even thinking very hard about what you're saying.

>I'd note that Facebook was one of the only companies NOT conspiring to deflate the wages of half of the people that visit this site

If you're referring to the fact that it was reported yesterday that Facebook refused to participate in the "no poaching" agreement between Apple, Google, and other companies, it is worth noting that Facebook's CEO is involved in a totally different, and probably much more permanent and far-reaching strategy for suppressing engineer salaries:

http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-...

Doesn't that potentially raise the salaries of all non-American engineers who might get jobs?

Yes, at the expense of American engineering salaries. Not a bad thing for innovation/technology as a whole but does lower American salaries.

If someone happens to be born in a country with worse labor opportunities, should we just say "have you tried being born in the US?" Articles like the Gawker one you link to only make sense if American workers are the only ones who matter.

On the other hand, strict immigration policies themselves depress wages for every person on the planet who's not American. I can guarantee you there are a lot of people think American businesses that hire H1Bs are fucking heroes.

Companies may be formally structured in such a way that they effectively act in an amoral fashion and merely seek to fulfill the wishes of their shareholders.

But they are also made of some less formal structures. Groups of people that believe privacy is important will be predisposed to assume that disrespecting that tenet will affect profit and the companies operating environment later. Even if this is not the case perhaps a company gains additional political capital in some area for it's behaviour and no single product is likely to be worth the loss of that clout.

If you take factors like these into account you can judge whether a company is predisposed to create outcomes you'd say are good or bad based on it's previous actions.

As to FB and the wages I do not give them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that it wasn't them acting on some outpouring of principal but purely needing the engineers as they grow more than they needed depressed wages. This may be unfair to them but their past actions do not align well with a more generous interpretation, though give it a few years with similar incidents and I'd reevaluate in their favour(I'd love to see it but I wouldn't hold my breath).

You've got a pretty damn shallow ethical barrel.

It seems to me that people here are confusing Facebook with companies that have their games and apps on Facebook. They are acting like Zynga has bought it.

You could argue whether Facebook is ethical by allowing Zynga and similar to use the platform the way they do, but that's a different story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com