Snowden: Tech Workers Are Complicit in How Their Companies Hurt Society

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/wxqx8q/snowden-tech-workers-are-complicit-in-how-their-companies-hurt-society

by AndrewBissell • 6 years ago

86 38 6 years ago

Of course we are, we get paid to sell out those beneath us for a dollar.

I liked to think I was helping people in my younger years but as I got more and more involved in ad tech, we just optimize for maximum profit no matter what else.

moksly• 6 years ago

Automation and efficiency isn’t inherently bad things though. If all the time and shit work you free up goes toward something useful and not just shareholders pockets then you’ve likely improved the world.

It’s up for your society to decide how it wants to distribute the rewards of its labour.

I’m not a Marxist by the way, I’m simply Scandinavian.

cambalache• 6 years ago

I agree with you, but sometimes I wonder if the big share of efficiency gains goes to a select few, somehow efficiency make society worst, at least from an equality point of view. That is what happened in the last 50 years in many countries. Sure you can buy a cheap Android phone for less than 1 day salary, but go buy a house. health insurance, retirement and send 2 kids to college with just one (or even 2) middle class salaries.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

As tech is one of those areas where there are a lot of moral compromises. I’d love to say that there are a ton of websites creating a good product and selling it, but most sadly depend on ad tech to survive.

melvinram• 6 years ago

Of course we are ... more involved in ad tech

Not all tech is ad tech. Please don't lump all tech into your statement of "get paid to sell out those beneath us for a dollar".

luckylion2• 6 years ago

The cynical response is probably that all tech is either ad tech, uses ad tech or builds things used by ad tech.

You don't really need ad tech to make that statement about selling out those beneath you applicable for most tech though. Work on self-driving cars? Good bye to people earning money driving cars. Yes, you can rationalize that by saying "no, we're just automating what can be automated to free human productivity and make sure their capacity isn't wasted on these trivial tasks", but this isn't Star Trek and they won't be freed from driving cars, they'll be out of a job.

Yes, there are exceptions, but yes, they are exceptions.

ChuckNorris89• 6 years ago

Unless your work involves helping people, treating or educating them, that's basically most industries, no?

Automotive, aerospace, consumer electronics, travel, advertising, mining, shipping, food, meat, chem, pretty much anything related to consumerism, all hurt society or the environment to some degree in order to benefit their customers and shareholders.

SW engineers are an easy target for the mainstream media since "they're paid huge sums for just sitting in front of a screen all day so they can't be adding much value to society as a physical laborer for example".

Edit: Of course, the main thing is if the damage done to society or the environment is outweighed by the benefits provided in return such as the food, energy and pharma industry.

balloob• 6 years ago

I work in home automation (Home Assistant) and we can improve our customer lives with privacy and local control without hurting society. And I bet a lot of other industries too.

raxxorrax• 6 years ago

How would you add privacy compared to a non-automated house? I developed a few devices with voice interfaces.

In normal cases you exchange privacy for convenience.

alkibiades• 6 years ago

how can a 25 year old say no to 400k a year :(

i can fire with that in a few years of complicity

unishark4• 6 years ago

Well if it's for the military or police many will refuse apparently. But they don't have as big a problem with tech companies having the power.

gorgoiler2• 6 years ago

Some things are objectively bad and should be regulated by society. Subverting the web for tracking and hoarding personal data are two big ones.

Regulation means laws proposed by a government, and it also means either an impact on the profits of entrepreneurs (n. fr. middle man) or at least a lot of press from entrepreneurs about how this will stifle innovation and stop the next generation reaching the American Dream: you know what’s cool? A billion dollars

It’s easy to hop skip and jump through all sorts of stages to end up at crazy conclusions, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to point to materialism, wealth inequality, and love of money as being serious corruptions. A little modesty and humility goes a long way. Maybe don’t [faux] celebrate the next massive tech exit as the top news item on HN?

pwdisswordfish2• 6 years ago

This comment is right on the money. No pun intended.

It was a serious mistake to dream that this sort of activity (surveillance and ad services) is the basis for the economy of the future. Time to wake up.

My heart sinks everytime I see an office floor of long tables and computer monitors. This is not the future we want. Don't care how much some people are getting paid now, or how easy they think their "jobs" are, the salaries will inevitably drop and the "work" will become increasingly mind-numbing. The purpose of all this: To analyse people's behaviour and serve them advertising (or worse). To pretend that people do not need to possess good judgment anymore because computers can tell us what decisions to make.

It is not an American Dream. It's a nightmare that is just beginning to take shape. Wake up.

unishark4• 6 years ago

It seems like a tautology to say subverting is objectively bad. When does tracking become subverting though?

Also it's a bit ironic to decry both materialism and wealth inequality at the same time. I guess if you're concerned about the wealthy's souls or something.

gorgoiler2• 6 years ago

I don’t want to overcome wealth inequality so we can all own Porsche SUVs.

I’m not interested in facilitating mass materialism. Materialism is the problem, and wealth inequality a symptom, in my experience.

someguyorother• 6 years ago

Also it's a bit ironic to decry both materialism and wealth inequality at the same time. I guess if you're concerned about the wealthy's souls or something.

You could probably do it along the lines of a Vimes' boots argument. "People who are poor can't afford essential services, medical support, etc., so their lives slowly degrade while they fill the void with empty consumerism. If there were equality, they would have been sufficiently well-off to directly deal with the problems of their lives."

That argument opposes materialism because it argues that consumerist materialism obscures real problems, and it is also in favor of equality as something that would improve people's lives.

ma2rten• 6 years ago

The article seemed incoherent to me. It went from "people who write spreadsheet apps are being subverted" (how?) to "the police is flying drones" to "tech workers need to stand up".

I haven't watched article interview, I'm hope it's more coherent and it's just VICE's summary.

creato• 6 years ago

and a letter signed by at least 1,666 Google employees demanding the company stop selling technology to police departments.

I had to read this link to see what it was talking about. Maybe some ridiculous AI crime prediction algorithm?

Google employees also expressed frustration with Google's praise of police departments like Clarkston PD that used G Suite software

Err, what the hell? Is someone supposed to be ashamed of selling email and docs/spreadsheet software to police departments? Of all the things Google does, selling G Suite is probably one of the most "moral". It's a simple exchange of money for basic useful services, with few/no strings attached.

What am I missing?

trevyn2• 6 years ago

complicit: “choosing to be involved in an illegal or questionable act.”

If you feel that the act is questionable, you know that you are involved, and you choose to remain involved, you are complicit.

Trying to morally distance yourself by coming up with justifications is self-hypnosis. Which is fine, but it’s deceiving yourself.

kmlx2• 6 years ago

yeah, they're using the wrong word as there's nothing questionable going on.

how people "feel" on the other hand...

AnthonyMouse2• 6 years ago

Should Google and everyone else also stop paying taxes, because they fund the police?

luckylion2• 6 years ago

If you feel that the act is questionable

The "act" of law enforcement in general? Is anyone (a few very confused people aside) even arguing that?

Ambol• 6 years ago

It's trendy this week to take simplistic positions regarding law enforcement, so people jump into that train. It costs them nothing, it makes them look good, and it makes them feel good about themselves without actually changing anything.

novok• 6 years ago

Are we going to get angry at staples because they buy paper there too?

Krasnol• 6 years ago

It's about this post: https://gsuite.google.com/customers/clarkstown-police-depart...

and the fact that Google chose this PD "while facing lawsuits for illegal surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists".

It's not about G Suite itself but this PD.

Seriously man, english is not even my native language but I could understand that.

lrem• 6 years ago

There are the AI principles now that are meant to prevent the ridiculous abuses of the advanced tech. The conversation has moved on to the level of "should we do any business with orgs we have moral doubts about". Anything "less moral" would raise an eyebrow.

seesawtron• 6 years ago

Previosuly discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23643777

wavesounds• 6 years ago

As engineers in tech have way more power than we realize. Its not a coincidence that the biggest most successful tech companies also have some of the best engineers working there. It's the engineers who made those companies successful not the other way around.

Wherever you work you have a responsibility to make sure your skills are being used for something you support. If you can't convince the leadership at your company to do the right thing then you need to leave and stop helping them. Go work for their competitors who are doing the right thing. There's tons of companies who pay just as well and aren't bad for society or the planet.

kmlx2• 6 years ago

It's the engineers who made those companies successful not the other way around.

looks reasonable at first, but not as clear-cut as one might think.

Wherever you work you have a responsibility to make sure your skills are being used for something you support.

i love it how rosy the world looks when i read this.

i've got acquaintances that fully support the arms trade, spyware, gambling etc they love it, they moved house for these kinds of jobs.

moral of the story is don't assume too much.

JohnTClark• 6 years ago

Every time I read this kind of message i feel like it's propaganda that is trying to make the west weaker by convincing people to not work on military technology. What you make can hurt people, yes, some people deserve to be hurt.

jsinai• 6 years ago

Just throwing this out there since we’re talking about morals: who deserves to be hurt and how do we decide that?

One of the big issues with tech involvement in security and defence is the shift in onus of responsibility from person to algorithm. Just this week we’ve seen a story top HN about a black man who was falsely identified as a terrorist by a facial recognition algorithm [1]. Closer scrutiny showed that the terrorist score was 52%, barely more than a coin flip. Even closer scrutiny showed that the image was grainy. Not once was a human called into the loop to assess the algorithm.

Maybe the intention was good (let’s use facial recognition technology to catch terrorists), but the tech itself was flawed and there was a failure to imagine scenarios where an innocent person is denied their liberty because the tech didn’t work. Add to this the racial inequality, and the lack of empathy becomes deeper. Would anyone feel comfortable deploying facial recognition technology if there was a 50% chance (a coin flip) that they themselves would be hit? Finally, this goes beyond race. Who (in the West) decides who (not the west) should get hurt (be killed really) because they are collateral? Again the empathy gap decides that life is cheap on the other side.

The problem with tech culture is that we don’t like to imagine scenarios where it just simply isn’t up to the task. This can become a matter of life and death (or liberty) when security and defence are involved. At no point am I saying that countries should not invest in technology for security and defence, but that rather such systems are weak if they’re merely brute force (even a conv net can be trained to brute force it’s test accuracy) and not highly accurate. And right now the technology isn’t ready for deployment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394

unishark4• 6 years ago

The application of AI in security is primarily needed to due to the enormity of the problem, not due to its ability to replace people. There simply isn't enough manpower or time to train experts and have them examine all the data. You can argue some of the data should not be examined at all for privacy reasons. But there are plenty of scenarios where privacy concerns won't hold. Such as comparing the security camera photo of a bank robber to mugshots.

The question of when it is reliable is an big one people have been working on a long time. For example in medicine the stakes are even higher. The problem is simply that recent technologies (deep learning) have taken a huge leap forward in performance, but a huge leap backwards when it comes to being able to assess confidence.

snarfy• 6 years ago

Citizens are complicit in how their governments hurt society. I'm not sure what he's getting at.

AnthonyMouse2• 6 years ago

I still think this is primarily a result of the financial regulations that effectively make it impossible to have an efficient anonymous digital payment system for small transactions.

The result is that adtech is the only other means to fill that need (you pay with data instead of money), so it does, so it's everywhere when it ought not to be.

You can make the case that people should refuse to work on it, but that's a lot easier to achieve in practice when the alternative isn't prohibited by law.

We need something equivalent to cash that works on the internet.

igravious• 6 years ago

Leans back in rocking chair, tamps pipe.

When I was younger I used to code in C and C++. Borland compiler and IDE tools were my favourite. From what I recall Microsoft stomped all over them. It was my first introduction Big Tech. I loved DOS (yes DOS!) and I was getting to learn Windows but I felt that Microsoft was stifling its competition by abusing its dominance of the PC OS market. I was young and naive and had never heard of Free (as in freedom) Software and Open Source was a term that was yet to be coined.

(I'm going somewhere relevant with this.)

When Linux came along it made a few small ripples, I jumped on board when it was maybe six or seven years old – a beat up PC running Slackware was being used as a router connected to an ISDN line in a business park I interned at. Some dude explained roughly how it worked and gave me a burnt CD. I had to figure out how to load CD drivers manually, compile the kernel manually, I learned so much. And in time I learned about FOSS and GNU and Stallman and the GPL. I thought, wow – that's a neat hack – using the legal system to guarantee freedoms. Giving people control over their devices, and way less of an opportunity for a big company to stifle it. I was a convert.

We're been at the Ad/Data Lock-in/Surveillance Tech equivalent of Stallman and the mythical printer for over a decade now. I personally think our modern Borland moment was when Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram (2012). That should never have been allowed by regulators. Not to mention WhatsApp (2014). Same for Google buying Android (2005), DoubleClick (2007), or Nest (2014). Not to mention Amazon aquistions. Nor Apple. I'm sure there are many more such examples. Someone mentioned this article (https://promarket.org/2019/12/09/the-lack-of-competition-has...) recently about the concentration of corporations in the US, I made a point of bookmarking the link. And that's before we even get on to the topics that Snowden brought to light.

It's hard not to become totally cynical. We need the contemporary equivalent of Stallman and Torvalds to do to Big Tech what GNU/Linux has done to Microsoft – and it was for Microsoft's own good, they're a much better company now! Linux could not have succeeded without the GPL. Do we need another legal hack to spread from the USA to the rest of the world? I'd say probably. Back in the day there were calls to break Microsoft up into a PC OS and Office tools divisions. There appears to be a complete unwillingness in the US to break up or prevent the formation of abusive monopolies in tech. Until antitrust regulators get their you know what together I think we need to legally mandate that key tech standards are federated. I cannot think of any other solution. We need to force Facebook and Twitter to plug into an ITU (https://www.itu.int/en/Pages/default.aspx) like standard for a start. (I think we can fix Amazon (and a whole lot more) by forcing them to pay their lowest paid workers and sub-contractors a whole lot more – but that's a whole other topic.) Google I don't know what to do about – possibly get them to divest Android? Force Android to be more open? It's already quite open though. And so is Chrome. They do have a complete monopoly on video streaming and censor and demonetise content in unpredictable, illiberal, anti-democratic and un-free ways – Facebook and Twitter are both unacceptable in this regard also in my eyes.

And it'll only get worse. Microsoft didn't change until they were forced to change. The lack of uptake of Mastadon and Diaspora prove that the FOSS model is not enough. We need FOSS++.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:List_of_mergers_and_a...

Snowden: Tech Workers Are Complicit in How Their Companies Hurt Society

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