I advise not making overly aggressive insinuations if you want your comments to be taken seriously: "But maybe you really hate your in-laws." Was that really a necessary addition? Even if it is possibly damaging I don't see any reason to assume malicious intent rather than ignorance.
So those factors listed essentially encompass your personality and dictate why a person does any action.
In that case, how do we hold anyone personally responsible for anything considering that the reason a person does any action is a result of their genetics and the environment they grow in?
Not criticizing, just wondering how others reconcile this.
My dad drank heavily while he was in the army. He swore off alcohol when I was seven, but I never saw him drink to alcoholic levels.
I think he drank to suppress the nightmares from serving in the front lines of two wars. I think he began tapering off when he left the army when I was three. I think he did so with no conscious plan. He just didn't need as much alcohol to push away his personal demons so he could sleep and he probably just naturally reduced it over time without really thinking about it.
I've got a serious medical condition. I used to take a lot of prescription medication. I've gotten off all the drugs. It's really normal for me to stop doing X slowly over time and not really notice it until later. It's common for me to only really notice a change precisely because I talk a lot about my medical stuff with my adult sons, so we periodically go over "Oh, yeah, you used to do X, Y and Z and you don't anymore."
I also spoke once with someone who had a lot of shame surrounding a DUI on their record. One of the stories they told me: They had surgery for something and when the doctors opened them up, they found one of the organs necrotic. This was unexpected and they expressed surprise that this individual was still alive. They removed the organ in the process of doing this other surgery. The individual quit drinking after that, but still saw themselves as a bad person and an alcoholic rather than someone who was managing a terrible and life threatening medical condition with alcohol until surgery happened to resolve it.
I'm convinced that this type of thing is much more common than is generally recognized.
> In that case, how do we hold anyone personally responsible for anything considering that the reason a person does any action is a result of their genetics and the environment they grow in?
Every society struggles with this - how to stop people from acting in ways that are anti-social? Nobody has a universal solution, because universal solutions can't and don't exist - but thats why we have judges and justice systems.
Accountability is different than responsibility. Is it the fault of a pedophile that the psychological reason for their desires came through no fault of their own? No, but they are still held accountable for acting upon such desires, as its clearly an assault on the victim. Its a bit like arguing causality - it can go in a loop and you can never come out. The line most societies draw is when one person negatively effects another (assault, fraud, etc), or has a high likelihood to negatively effect another (driving dangerously, some would say drug use).
Note that being an alcoholic itself isn't illegal. Its a legal drug, you can have as much as you want as an adult in a free society. All the illegalities come in when your alcoholism negatively effects others.
Human being is fundamentally weak. The worst and mostly uncontrollable factor leading to addiction is not having a friend when you really need someone. It's not someone's fault. If person is assole and that's why can't befriend anyone, maybe it's because that person was traumatized by cruelty or ignorance in the past. We are weak and can't handle our lives alone at all.
That is the core of their business though and that fact seems pretty clear from basic research, what did you expect? If you find advertising/tracking reprehensible, why would you agree to an interview in the first place?
>I previously wanted to work "for the giants" because, well, money, and prestige, and "cool problems" etc.
I had fewer ethics then, as I was still basically a bright eyed kid. Also I had never been financially well off, and therefore had never really been able to afford being principled. And honestly I truly did not realize how pervasive advertising was for google.
> And honestly I truly did not realize how pervasive advertising was for google.
That sounds extremely naive. It's like being surprised by how pervasive basketball is for the LA Lakers. I mean, what exactly did you believed the company did?
Really? How many people outside of tech honestly understand that Google is 90% advertising and 10% "other" instead of more like 50% search company and 50% "other" like they tried to pretend to be for so long? Go ask your grandma what google does.
I was not born in Silicon Valley. Could have probably talked to you a little about potato farming though, and the purchase of Hannaford by Del Haize
If they made their current net annual income for the entirety of their existence (not even close), then they would've needed to be taxed ~50% to have reached $1 trillion in taxes.
I get (or at least hope) that it's an exaggeration, but I'm not too keen on seemingly witty phrases without substance that get repeated everywhere.
Not one of the downvoters, but the general mindset is that if you thank someone and emphasize their comment, you should've just upvoted because you didn't really add anything to the thread.
Of course your customers having more money means that businesses will try to capture that excess, that's the foundation of price discrimination. The whole concept of coupons is that some customers with more money won't care enough about the price difference, so they'll ignore the coupons and pay full retail price while more price sensitive customers will use the coupon and pay less.
Wasn't this already known though? There was an undiscovered bug that allowed organizations access greater than they were supposed to have, I feel like it's beating a dead horse by this point.
1. It wasn't a bug, it was a feature. The API explicitly allowed apps access to friends' information. They weren't exploiting the API.
2. The article describes the Cambridge Analytica database in particular being available "to verified researchers" but someone threw credentials onto GitHub where anyone could have borrowed them
I feel like this issue, and others like it, cannot be thrown in people's faces enough. People need to get angry to affect change.
If we want our industry to take privacy seriously, we need people to take a principled stand. Making them aware of, and outraged over, flagrant violations of your privacy, and trust, is the easiest way to do that.
The battle is lost. People by and large have decided that it is worth sacrificing most of their privacy to use "free" services like Facebook and google. The only relief at this point is regulatory.
Yeah, and just because many people are happy to trade it away doesn't mean everyone is. (And of course many don't realize just how much they're trading away...)
Privacy? What privacy? It most jurisdictions in this country I can search property records, obtain the names of those owning if not in residence, property values, when purchased and so on. Then I can cross reference other government databases and eventually onto private setups like the one in the article.
people and washington are bemoaning what happens at Google, Facebook, and the like, yet totally ignoring all the information readily available to the public for anyone to take from government itself.
Example, if you know a street address or owner's name in Cobb County Georgia will allow you to search. The amount of information available there is and the type is far more dangerous than what was discovered via a facebook quiz.
