Comment by neilv
10 hours ago
After all the surveillance capitalism abuses over the last 2-3 decades of Web, it's a little late to be pushing back, but... should we start shunning individuals from companies who implement this?
Whether it's from companies that create the tech, or companies that use it.
In the orgy of money, we've had a kind of industry-wide sociopathic convention of individual engineers considering it perfectly OK to further surveillance capitalism.
Can we reverse that?
If someone says we can't, because "everyone does it", are they saying that we're a field of baddies?
I agree, wholeheartedly - lets get a list of the google engineers who worked on this. What do you propose we do with it?
Spread the word. They need to be held accountable the same way elected officials are --- except in this case they're not even elected.
I had more the thought like being skeptical of anyone who would take a job at company Foo or stay there, when they tell you. To me that seems preferable to trying to -- what risks devolving into -- a witch hunt of fall guys (persons), and doxxing people.
I think we are already starting to have that with a couple more infamous other companies in the news the last year: if someone goes to work there, I suspect a lot of people are going to think what is wrong with you, since you must know that company does very harmful things,
Maybe it's time to start wondering that about anyone who'd work for a lot of additional companies?
(I actually had a recruiter recently who was pitching a startup, and the headline featured the "ex-" pedigrees of the founders, including an especially infamous company. I figured any company touting that pedigree as a selling point is probably a bad fit for me. I thanked the recruiter, but said that infamous company as selling point probably isn't a fit. The recruiter seemed to not only understand, but to agree with my vague sentiment about that pedigree company.)