You’re pushing apologist narratives that are friendly to China (a current and ongoing perpetrator of ethnic cleansing within their own borders), Russia (a historical, current, and ongoing perpetrator of ethnic cleansing and genocide within and outside of its own borders, and the aggressor in the Ukrainian War), and North Korea (a totalitarian pariah state), all because those three nations have a vague historical connection to Marxist-Leninist politics (which, pointedly, they’re very, VERY far removed from these days). That’s what “being a tankie” is.

I am not insinuating that the US is some paragon of virtue and blameless, nor was I trying to.

I am saying that you’re falling into the same trap you’re trying to say I fell into, only from the other side.

But from the looks of your second paragraph, you’re just a tankie, so this conversation is clearly not going to go anywhere.

Oh, that’s not what I’m saying.

I’m saying you’re spreading nonsense propaganda and are pushing an agenda that effectively enables Russian military adventurism and imperialism/nationalism, and I’m calling you out on it. I was just being a bit oblique about it. But I can be direct, too.

Hey! You must be new to the internet. Here’s a tip:

Just because someone says something is debunked - even if that someone had a YouTube channel with a ton of followers - doesn’t mean it’s actually debunked. People do, in fact, just go on the internet and tell lies, and it’s pretty common.

For real - look at the damage “tech literate” corporate leaders are doing to the internet in particular, and society in general. The issue is less about knowledge and aptitude, and more about morals and ethics, and how those principles interact with the desire for profitability driven by investors and owners.

As someone who works at a company with relevant regulatory obligations, I plan on forwarding this article to our infosec team tomorrow.

I’m a software engineer. I know what a TODO is.

My point is that privacy should have been a core design consideration, not something you factor in and handle later as a secondary concern. Put another way: the initial problem thesis that they wrote a proposal to solve should have included the idea of user privacy as a core element.

It’s a matter of incorrectly prioritized design goals that yield something which has very obvious potential to be actively harmful to users.

Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)

Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.

Perhaps most tellingly:

<i>Todo</i>

## Privacy considerations ## {#privacy}

<i>Todo</i>

If that’s the level of seriousness they treat user privacy with, these engineers deserve to be lambasted.

This is a conscious abrogation of engineering ethics, and as a software engineer myself, it offends me immensely. It makes me and my entire profession look bad.

Edit: leaving less pressing design concerns as a TODO is fine. My issue is that user privacy is implicitly being declared as a secondary concern by the simple fact that it’s left as a TODO. The engineers should not have even considered releasing this, even in draft form, until they had something coherent and meaningful to address user privacy with. It should have been treated as a core design element.