I find it fascinating reading hacker news, full of IT folk who simultaneously build software that enables and profits from the advertising and personal information selling & tracking industry - are also the same people who complain the loudest about it. Unbelievable.
Probably because people like us have more visibility on the huge scope and consequences of this kind of privacy invasion. Most people don't actually see this with their own eyes. They probably know it's happening in the back of their heads but it's not 'real' to them. It's very real when you know you could technically run a report of all your users that also have grindr installed.
I'm sure most of us would prefer not to work somewhere that does it but we need to eat too.. And we have no input in this.
For example recently I was given a presentation on a new IoT product at work. Immediately I asked why we're not supporting open standards stuff like matter as a protocol. And I was told that'll never fly with marketing because they want to have all the customers to have eyes on their app for their 'metrics' and upselling. I told them fine but I'm definitely not using this crap myself. But it was shrugged off. We are too few for them to care about. And it makes us very unpopular in the company too. So it's a risky thing to do that doesn't help anyway. The "don't fight them but join them and change from within" idea is a fallacy.
Yes, because everyone on Hackernews is identical and working on the exact same stuff. It's not like it's a few companies enabling this and each marketing department going like oooooh i want that.
There’s no code of conduct or rule book that anyone should follow so ethics is determined at the individual level. That quickly turns to, either I build it for them or the next guy will. Resistance is futile type thing.
Most other types of engineering have published rules and standards and industry credentialing including ethics tied into it and loss of credentials for an ethics violation would be career ending in many cases.
(I can only think of straw-man examples. Does the private prison industry have problems getting architects, civil engineers, electrical engineers? Does the pharma industry have problems getting chemical engineers for manufacturing addictive painkillers?)
Architects have to build to codes and have their plans signed off by an engineer that is very much liable for the basic safety of the structure.
I’m a CFO and the CPA credential helps a whole industry of accountants avoid outright shenanigans that would take place if we could report financials the way sales, marketing and some others would prefer. We also have a whole layer of audits to help make sure what we say is true, is true.
It’s obviously not perfect and There’s always going to be bad actors but having industry guardrails does help a lot more than is obvious. This is one of those things we’re the absence of data is the data. The fact it’s pretty rare for a skyscraper to structurally fail and Enron type financial fraud situations are relatively rare. It’s hard to imagine how much things around us would be worse without checks and balances.
As for pharma example, I think it’s a good point but also a bit of a case study in where this should have worked but didn’t. Those sometimes are necessary things. Just like how originally technologists thought social media was beneficial to society, it could perhaps be revisited with a different opinion with a different perspective with benefit of hindsight. It’s pretty subjective and opinionated but I personally think R&D should be pretty loose. In pharma, you have to be pretty open minded as it seems sometimes things are discovered while in search of something else. The business of pharma, the sales people pushing those addictive pain meds, should be able to push them (with an expectation of presenting accurate data of research/side effects/etc). Prescribing physicians are ultimately the best check. Even when lied to about addiction stats, they didn’t seem to perform the appropriate check/balance as their profession would normally have done and sound alarms / stop prescribing. Instead, as a whole, they leaned into the idea that pain should be more aggressively managed than it has been in the past. They were all very slow to act even when addiction had been identified as a problem. The confluence of all these things has caused the industry to become introspective and change some things in hopes to avoid a similar repeat. Just like Enron did for finance and household accident data drives improving building guidelines. Software remains the Wild West without something similar in place.
To circle back to the CPA example as that’s what I’m most familiar with, it doesn’t tell me not to work in a particular industry. Like, private prisons need accountants. But it tells me what type of accounting practices are acceptable. I’d imagine a similar example for the context of this topic, is you wouldn’t be told not to work for an adtech company but in that employment you would be able to say certain types of data sharing is decidedly inappropriate according to your industry standards and you would be putting your career in jeopardy by building a feature sales requested. Furthermore you have things like whistleblowing hotlines and eventually other companies that couldn’t work with your adtech company because doing so would be considered an ethics violation on their part. Etc etc.
We might not be the same. Every time someone asks for tracking anything I complain and question a lot. People hate me, but if there is no real use case for storing all information we can get I will veto as much as I can.
The IT folks working in the advertising industry are much more the "who cares, everyone has all our data already anyway".
So you think individuals have control over how the industry works? The insight it gives devs is why some are so outspoken about it. This is a good thing.
