Comment by globalise83
7 days ago
This system was designed and implemented by engineers who committed code in a source control system with their name attached, and the changes were requested by product managers in tickets in the ticketing system with their name attached. Those engineers and product managers should be personally liable for an equivalent % of their annual salary as Facebook is liable for a % of its annual revenue.
Sounds like the modern version of the CS Lewis quote:
> The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
Too true. See also the movie Conspiracy.
I like the idea, but I see no reason to shield the management that demanded this of the rank and file. Accountability should go all the way up the chain.
Yes, but it should include everyone involved, from top to bottom. We won't get those data theft misfeatures if engineers refused to work on them out of personal liability.
I once bluntly refused to deploy an app to production because it was a finance system that handled billions of dollars and the personal data of a million children. The HTTPS certificates couldn’t be organised on time (don’t ask), so I simply refused to deploy it using HTTP only “just for now” (=years).
The look of stunned shock on the project manager’s face is something I’ll never forget.
He was apoplectic with mixed rage and incredulity.
“How dare you refuse a direct order!?” — but now picture a red face and spittle literally flying around the room.
He immediately called my supervisor and up all the way to the CEO of my consultancy.
That’s what happens when individual contributors push back. In general there are zero legal, corporate, or personal protections.
“Do as I say or consequences.” is the norm.
In this situation I was incredibly lucky that the CEO trusted my judgement and told the PM to take a hike. Even if I had been fired I would have been okay.
Most people can’t take risks like that on principle.
That’s fundamentally why enshittification happens, and why every mobile apps’ data collection dragnet would make an NSA spook blush.
Only consequences for directors and up matter. They're the ones that need to feel the fear, not the poor outsourcer struggling to put food on his family table.
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I dont think we should fine any of the people that worked on it. In the end the decision makers are the ones being paid to be responsible so they should be held responsible.
However, there is a conversation to be had about engineers writing code that they fully know is illegal. Imo there should be a punishment for staying complicit and not reporting it to the authorities. Like that time Volkswagen components detected when they were under test and performed differently.
I think assuming engineers know about the legality of some of these features is a far fetch. Pixel tracking has been a thing for more than a decade now, Google does it, Meta does it and theyre but the two biggest players but a lot of companies track and read cookies for personalization reasons. It may feel wrong but it is hard to blame an engineer for thinking of it as just another normal feature. The PMs, Managers and leadership should be responsible for this but at Meta, Managers are trackers and slave masters, not thinkers. Features are to be delivered fast, there is no room to think and plan. Metrics rule everything even when they are clearly evil.
This is such an incredibly bad (ignorant and/or malicious) idea in so many ways, chief of which is the incredible power asymmetry between bosses and subordinates in Facebook (and most other companies).
How would the EU fine American engineers who live and are paid in America?
They would fine them by having a court case and saying they are guilty and owe money. Collecting on it would be awfully difficult, but you know, people do like trips to Europe.
That said, I think fining the company seems pretty plausible. They won't, but it'd be nice if they did.
Well some of them definitely has savings in Europe and like to travel destinations in Europe.
Can't America fine them? Surely this is illegal there too?
There is probably little to no chance of that happening in the current political climate.
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Its unethical for sure, seems like some engineers will do anything for their salary, but if they don't do it somebody else will and it is an exciting technical challenge.
Its better to blame the management and higher ups or zuck himself directly. Blame the people who finance it and profit from it, not the people who coded it. Follow the money
> Its unethical for sure, seems like some engineers will do anything for their salary, but if they don't do it somebody else will and it is an exciting technical challenge.
I remember finding this out as a very junior engineer straight out of university. I was once asked to write code to cheat at a benchmark to make my company's product look better than it actually was. I had deep misgivings about this, but as a brand new junior developer, I was very hesitant to speak up. Eventually I told my manager I didn't feel comfortable with the ethics of working on that project, and he was totally cool with it! He said "No problem, we'll take that task out of your queue and give it to "Jim", he'll do it instead." Jim was thrilled and wrote the benchmarking cheating code himself.
There's always someone willing to do it.
In other more heavily regulated industries, whistleblowers are fortunately compensated and protected for raising such ethical issues. I wonder how far tech can go before we start to see similar government agencies and rules put in place to do the same.
Or blame them all. “If I don’t do it someone else will” hasn’t been accepted as an excuse historically, I don’t see a good reason to change that now.
(also, is it an exciting technical challenge? It’s a POST request to localhost!)
and they call themselves "engineer"
This is the company that abetted genocide in Burma. Their programmers are outside EU jurisdiction. You expect them to do anything other than pay the fine, shrug, and continue to set the world on fire?
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How often you're asked has no bearing on the morality or criminality of the ask.
Hitmen can't just say "but I keep getting hired to kill people."
Comparing engineers writing tracking code for ads, to hitmen killing people, is an extremely dishonest and emotionally manipulative comparison. These things aren't even in the same category, and you know it.
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do what engineers in other fields do
Let’s be real, the people who are culpable are truly culpable are the ones who gave them the ok to build this in the first place.
If you hire a hitman both you and the hitman are liable. Same here.
Yeah and let's take away the income from the PMs and Engineers and leave the people who actually call the shots unharmed.
Once I worked at a place that actually made a calculation of how much an outage costed to the company and gave it to the engineers who resolved the issue to "think" about how bad they were.
What you propose is equally confused and wrong