The only thing worse than an echo chamber is letting a self-created bad idea fester in the head.
I came to the conclusion a few months ago that software developers and coders who worked at Meta, Google, Amazon, etc are as culprit as their CEOs and the company itself. I will lay down my points below, but I understand that this might be a logical extreme of my distaste for these corporations.
Here’s my rationale:
- Actions of the company they serve: The corporations they serve actively disenfranchise users, track them, sell their private / personal information to unscrupulous parties without any care on how it affects the person, or the society. They thrive on engagement rather than content. They have “commodified” the fundamental right to privacy. This has real world implications that has directly resulted in the spread of misinformation, political unrest, threatened elections, riots, and deaths of thousands of people.
- Awareness of the consequences: By virtue of their position, these are people with the capacity to read, and think for themselves. There are news articles: across the political spectrum in all major news sites, that report how the platform/ company they serve negatively affects society. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Snowden’s expose, etc are credible and well documented examples that even non-tech people are aware. Yet they choose to ignore all this, and continue working / seek to join these companies.
- Cowardice: It is often wrapped in the garb of “self-interest”, but they do not raise their voice when they know that the software and platform they’re told to develop is going to be used to spy on their brethren. They claim they’re trying to make a living, but can use their skills to develop counter products to these horrible companies, or work for those that are sensitive and conscientious towards customer’s needs and welfare.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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While I agree with the general ideas mentioned, each of them is much more complicated than that, except for the first point, that’s a point that’s nearly impossible to counter honestly.
Point 1 is, in my opinion, it 100% accurate, ad I mentioned above.
On point 2, pero everything, from my perspective, is absolutely correct, except for: “Yet they choose to ignore all this continue working / seek to join these companies.”. A lot of people don’t really have an option at the beginning. We all need to make a living, and finding well paying jobs is difficult enough across the board, and becomes infinitely harder if you get" picky" about where you apply or which companies you accept offer from. In a perfect world developers that get hired and well paid by any of these disgusting corporations would accrue some good cash to be financially secure for a few years and then quit and move to, like you said, creating the “counter-product/service” to what they were working on, adding the ethical factor. In reality, unless you’re loaded, we all need to start somewhere, and everything costs money.
Point 3, I would say there is some true to the cowardice side, but I also believe that, at least temporarily, some just don’t have a choice, for the factors mentioned in my response to point 2. “They claim they’re trying to make a living, but can use their skills to develop counter products to these horrible companies, or work for those that are sensitive and conscientious towards customer’s needs and welfare.”, as mentioned above, everything costs money. A more realistic approach would be getting that spiteful job, cashing out with a good sense of financial freedom, and then endeavoring into countering these companies.
It’s taken me 12 years to finally be in a place where I can make a slight difference in my industry by opening my own business, and after almost a year since I started, while my employees and contractors all earn good money and get paid always on time and gather pretty good benefits, and my clients are (I believe) the happiest in the industry, my wife and I (the owners) have still to get paid the first time. Imagine the shit show that my life would be I’d I had gone the ideallist way without considering all the financial aspects of trying to improve this industry.
I do not work in the tech sector, but we do use tech for everything. My platform is currently the most secure and private of the whole industry in the US, and that alone ate through around 75% of the starting budget, the rest has been allocated to pay staff and services while we bring this to cash-positive status.
It’s not as black and white as some may think.