I don't understand why people read yet another story about FB's bad behavior somehow conclude all of big tech are bad guys. Is it really so hard to keep them straight?
I mean, there are plenty of stories about Google, Amazon, Apple behaving in ways that could lead someone to that conclusion. Microsoft has the best reputation to me, but I'm young enough that the EEE days don't hold much resonance.
You would think so, but I think the general consensus is that every SV tech company will do evil in a heartbeat if it will improve adoption, retention, or any other KPI, making privacy-respecting companies the exception, not the rule.
Incentives. FB behaves like this because it's profitable for them to do so. Do you expect this sort of behavior is somehow not profitable for other companies of their scale?
Because only one of these companies needs to make a mistake before they all should learn from it. It would be like watching every construction company make the same egregious safety error one after the other. The first one to make the mistake is not as guilty as the 10th company to make the mistake after having just watched the previous 9.
This could be a disconnect between engineers who wanted to make a smooth experience on all devices and PR manager who does not want anything that could be construed as unethical behavior. IMO if this does affect performance it should probably be an option.
This. It's a handwavy familiar term (without defending its usage).
Remember that nowadays people call soundless videos "GIFs", browsers curtail web adresses, and companies report leak passwords as being encrypted when they were actually hashed.
Tangentially related. Big tech (FB, Google etc..) used to be favourite workplaces for programmers. Now what are the exciting workspaces for engineers considering big tech is doing lot of unethical things?
Everyone will have a different experience - it’s difficult to fathom the scale of how much work is being done at these companies from the outside.
Consumers often have the mistaken assumption that they know what a large tech company is basically doing. In reality, there are thousands of projects, most of which you’ll never hear about.
In my experience people are more affected by their manager and working group than the company clashing with their ideals.
If you are passionate about privacy, I believe one of the best things you could do in practice is is join a big tech co and work on E2E encryption, security, privacy controls, homomorphic encryption, etc. Change is easier from within
