Comment by theptip

I'm not arguing that the users got hacked, I'm arguing that the competitors got hacked.

“Facebook Research” was the Onavo codebase, under a different name, signed by Facebook’s Enterprise certificate.

> The analysis is just a bunch of circumstantial observations that _it is possible_ FB was doing more skeezy stuff than was previously known.

No, it was already well-known way back in 2018, which is why that piece of shit app was withdrawn from App Store in the first place. Facebook’s enterprise account later got suspended in 2019 for distributing the paid piece of shit through enterprise MDM.

Maybe you're on H1B and if you get let go you have to go back to Sri Lanka, whose government collapsed 2 years ago and left the country in political disarray. Some people have better choices than others.

Like I wouldn't work on this project, but I have US citizenship. In college I slept over at some of my Indian friends' apartments and often they had like 8-12 guys sleeping in one bedroom, it was just a bunch of mattresses all laid together with no specific sleeping arrangement. Generally they made a giant pot of stew/daal/whatever once a week and ate the same thing for every meal all week, some even long after graduating with PhD's and getting low-tier visa-mill jobs. This was not a T10 school, our international students rarely came from wealthy families. One of my Saudi classmates came from a poor family in a remote village near the Iraq border and brushed his teeth with a twig from the Salvadora persica tree.

I couldn't really blame them if they didn't have another good option readily available.

I was talking about this with friends the other night. If you've been in the industry long enough, you've probably been party to creating something horrible. It takes a while for the reality of horribleness to crack the glamour of creation and monetary reward, but once it does, everyone I personally know has quit and lived with the regret.

I know people who have worked for adtech, gambling and HFT industries who now try to convince younger devs to avoid them. I personally worked briefly for a private prison corp, and I feel dirty and remorseful that I had anything to do with that industry.

Trying to bring an open mind, I could see a number of plausible scenarios where an engineer could do this, with various degrees of legitimacy.

It's certainly a complicated subject, but I think in general companies are really good, especially big ones, at getting people to work on things they might not be comfortable with otherwise. This thread has been talking the extremes like immigration status, but there are all kinds of subtle pressures as well. Some people might not believe they have the political capital to outright refuse a project (especially a pet project of the CEO) vs choose to accept and try to nudge the project onto more solid footing. And I suspect many engineers are terrified of being labelled as not a team player, which aids in the creation of group think, but makes it very difficult to foster a healthy culture of discussion that would bring forward the serious concerns of this work. And there is almost always some room of uncertainty as the last convincer... is it unethical to work on the project if the consumer is fully informed and offers consent to the invasion of privacy?

If there is an extreme where it's justifiable, for any reasonable engineer to accept the project, then it get's really muddy on where exactly the line is, and when it should be drawn.

I also suspect many of us envision ourselves having much more fortitude than we really do as well, imagining the heroic efforts we'd put in to changing a companies mind from a bad idea... where the more likely outcome for most of us is to fall silently into the background.

When I was in the music biz I pushed back hard against DRM. I lost, but being on the inside I could swing the needle to the least restrictive DRM as possible (e.g. it let you burn a CD for instance). Most of the other devs I worked with would have simply taken the ultra-restrictive spec, coded it and gone home happy each night. (I did code some shitty ActiveX object for Sony to put on one of their unrippable CDs though... it let you download a DRM-hobbled version of the song)

I can count on one hand though the number of devs I've worked with that saw coding as anything more than a 9-5 grind and would have spoken up if asked to do something shady.

It takes the correct morally bankrupt person to be willing to take the job.

You really think the engineers working on this will be personally liable for this? That would honestly surprise me, the worst i can imagine is punishment for the company as an entity.