[HN Gopher] The most unethical thing I was asked to build while ...
___________________________________________________________________
The most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at
Twitter in 2015
Author : sgk284
Score : 431 points
Date : 2022-11-07 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| woojoo666 wrote:
| > As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack
| genuinely didn't like it.
|
| > I don't know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner
| of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things
| with the data.
|
| When has Elon been against user privacy? Also, isn't Elon good
| friends with Jack? I feel like they would see eye to eye with
| this. In fact Elon seems like the type that would try to champion
| emerging fads like crypto, differential privacy, and zero
| knowledge proofs. Harvesting data is boring and easy.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Elon has a _significantly_ stronger profit motive, given his
| high purchase price and Twitter's otherwise tanking advertising
| sales.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| And yet his first move after purchase is to charge for the
| blue check service. Bringing non-data mined revenue to
| Twitter is one of the keys for aligning the company with
| respecting privacy. Either way, stories like this are one
| reason you should avoid social media apps altogether and
| never allow an app to access location data, especially not
| while in use.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Trying to get more users to pay for the service (while
| notably _not_ reducing their ad profile or how many ads
| they see) strengthens my point: he's clearly trying to
| maximize the value of an unwise purchase, and leveraging
| every saleable form of personal information is an obvious
| next step.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _while notably not reducing their ad profile or how
| many ads they see_
|
| They are reducing ads for subscribers:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/05/twitter-begins-rolling-
| out...
|
| EDIT: can someone explain the downvotes? Is the
| TechCrunch story not accurate, or did I misunderstand the
| above claim regarding ads?
| wilg wrote:
| Well he did say the _idea_ was to see half as many ads.
| (Not a great value prop though imo)
| smbullet wrote:
| This argument seems tautological.
|
| - If he's charging for the service now then he'll clearly
| do anything to maximize profits.
|
| - If the service remains free then he clearly needs to
| sell granular user data to stay above water.
|
| Perhaps I'm missing the point you're trying to make but I
| don't think you can conclude anything from this.
| woodruffw wrote:
| You're confusing the conditionality of these: they're not
| in conflict. They're both _means_ to the same unavoidable
| end: Twitter _needs_ to make money, probably even be
| profitable, in order to not pose a rise to Musk's other
| ventures.
|
| He can make people pay, or not, or jack up tracking, or
| not. It doesn't matter to me! The point is solely that he
| needs to do something.
| matwood wrote:
| > maximize profits
|
| Elon/Twitter isn't even in the ballpark of maximizing
| profits yet. They are just trying to make the 1-1.5B debt
| payment that's going to come due. That's going to require
| huge cuts we just saw, plus advertisers to stay on board,
| plus Twitter blue, plus whatever else he can cook up.
| And, it still might not be enough.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Everything published on Twitter except for DMs is open to
| the whole internet to crawl. It is a public platform. I
| think it's fair game to serve you ads about Doritos if
| you are tweeting about potato chips and following Frito
| Lays.
|
| Location based, privately identifiable, data is a bridge
| too far for me. But we also know for a fact other social
| media apps already do this if Twitter's app does not
| already do this currently.
|
| The hype about Twitter being an unwise purchase is just
| noise from the peanut gallery. You should take such noise
| with a grain of salt.
|
| Twitter was always under pressure to maximize value to
| shareholders. Same with every other tech company.
| Different companies sometimes make different trade-offs.
| I fail to see why Musk is somehow going to do any worse
| than what we've seen from social media companies over the
| past 15 years. But I do think there's a reasonable chance
| he'll do better.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Here's the thing: it can be a bridge too far for you!
| It's certainly a bridge too far for me. But neither of us
| matter, because it's not our money on the line. It's his
| money, a _lot_ of his money, and the longer it hangs the
| more systemic risk it poses to his other ventures.
|
| When I say it was an "unwise purchase," what I mean is
| this: the stock market did not think Twitter was worth
| that much. Even when Elon was _legally committed_ to
| purchasing Twitter, the deal seemed so manifestly absurd
| to the market that the price did not rise to meet his
| offer (which is as close as you can get to free money in
| the market). Is that the peanut gallery? Sure, but in no
| larger a sense than that our entire economy and value
| drive is controlled by the same system.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| When "selling user data" is the line between losing 44-billion
| dollars and NOT losing 44-billion dollars, lines get very
| blurry.
| mymyairduster wrote:
| That's silly be bought a 22-billion dollar company for
| 44-billion dollars and he's well on his way to doubling that
| value
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There is no such line. There are plenty of ways to monetize
| an application.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Twitter has around $1.3 billion in free cash flow not counting
| the one time settlement they did last year.
|
| Now Musk is on the hook for over $1B in interest payments after
| buying Twitter and overpaying for it. Do you really think you
| can trust him to do what's in the best interest of users?
| yewenjie wrote:
| > Harvesting data is boring and easy.
|
| Boring, easy, yet highly profitable. And sometimes the only
| boring and easy way to be profitable.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Elon has never had a company that made money on ad revenue,
| despite every other tech CEO on earth trying to monetize in
| that direction.
|
| So I agree, and feel like the default assumption is that he's
| going to try to get users to directly pay for content, which is
| what he's doing with Twitter Blue. We'll see if it works.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| "For this to be true," Musk continued, "it is essential to show
| Twitter users advertising that is as relevant as possible to
| their needs. Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant
| ads are actually content!"
|
| https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-says-loves-ads
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Zzzz
|
| Elon Musk is your run off the mill, basic capitalist that got
| lucky and rich off the back of the state. You're horribly
| gullible if you think he wouldn't do that.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > When has Elon been against user privacy?
|
| Get into a car accident, and want some blackbox data from your
| Tesla? Good luck - get ready for a lot of legal costs.
|
| Get into a car accident, and it makes Tesla look bad? Tesla
| will hold press conferences and release your telemetry data to
| the media, whether you want them to or not. Exceptionally
| misleading data in some cases - one fatality collision where
| autopilot was being blamed, Tesla said "Woah, hold up. Not
| true. Driver was distracted. In fact, the car warned him to put
| his hands on the steering wheel before the collision!"
|
| In reality, the car had issued -one- warning about the steering
| wheel, and none after that, and that one warning was -eighteen
| minutes- before the collision.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| This made me cringe:
|
| > Legal said the request was fine - none of it violated the user
| ToS.
|
| Almost as if was watching an episode of some dystopian show
| happening somewhere in the future. It's sad to learn it's already
| happened.
| paulcole wrote:
| There's a reason that it's called the legal department and not
| the moral department. They're paid for legal advice. What's
| "right" and "wrong" only sometimes factors into that advice.
| MockObject wrote:
| What would a Telco do to me with such data? Anything that I would
| care about?
| mobileexpert wrote:
| There are tons of data brokers that get near real time user level
| location data from mobile apps (usually not from 'name brand'
| apps but from the long tail) and then sell this as aggregated
| data products to others: eg
| https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/monthly-patterns .
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data.
|
| I notice here the casual dismissal of actual, observed harm for
| the sake of fantasies of future harm. I wish that the similar
| casual dismissal of government censorship laundered through
| private media monopolies came with some similar sort of fear of
| how President Trump or President DeSantis will handle their
| brand-new tools in a couple of years.
|
| That being said, Democrats saw what Bush did with his unchecked
| executive powers, and didn't roll a thing back when they later
| had the Presidency and both houses of Congress. Instead, they
| continued doing politics by executive order, and cemented AUMF as
| a declaration of a permanent state of emergency.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| All individuals are incentivized to do the wrong thing. CEO's are
| incentivized to sell data to make money. Engineers are
| incentivized to create bad software via making the people who pay
| them happier. Users are incentivized to give up their data in
| exchange for a free service. Politicians are incentivized by
| political donations and getting information they aren't
| constitutionally privileged to get.
|
| Doing the ethical thing requires making less money (or losing
| money) for nearly all parties involved. Doing the right thing
| requires sacrifice.
|
| In a happy world, the CEO has long term vision and sees the long
| term cost of loss of trust. The engineers see the ethical problem
| or betraying their peers and use their pocket veto to do the
| right thing. The user should be willing to pay a reasonable cost
| to receive the service they use. Politicians should see that the
| individual incentives harm the whole and create regulations that
| disincentivize the poor behavior.
|
| Non-rhetorically: How do we ensure as a society that we live in
| the latter, and not the former?
| bogwog wrote:
| Twitter and tech companies are not the first industry to have
| ethical problems like this. This is a problem we've solved many
| times in the past with strict regulations and laws. Finding
| ethical people is expensive, but writing laws is cheap.
|
| If actual data privacy laws existed in the US, this situation
| would never have happened. In the linked twitter thread, he
| says that "legal" said it was ok. That right there is the
| safety valve that we can control to keep corporations in check.
|
| Why doesn't my local supermarket price gouge us when there's a
| hurricane about to hit? That's an obvious way to increase
| profits. In fact, if it weren't illegal to do that, I'd argue
| that any CEO who didn't do that for "ethical reasons" should be
| fired and possibly even sued by shareholders.
| louthy wrote:
| That's what governments and laws are for. Expecting companies
| to work for the greater good is naive at best; and we shouldn't
| really get upset when they don't. That's not their motivation,
| as you've highlighted.
|
| Strong legislation and independent legislators are what's
| needed
| hayst4ck wrote:
| While I agree completely, it seems that legislative ability
| is captured by the upper class, reinforcing the cycle of
| self-enrichment at the cost of global good.
|
| I guess the root question is: how should middle class people
| wage class warfare?
| kodyo wrote:
| You appear to have a misunderstanding about the nature of
| government, sir.
| Tryk wrote:
| Pray tell, what is the nature of government?
| kodyo wrote:
| They're run by thieves and murderers.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Non-rhetorically: How do we ensure as a society that we live
| in the latter, and not the former?
|
| Incentive alignment. Nothing short of hardcore government
| regulation of personal data, and the remuneration for (opt-in)
| usage of said data, will change anything.
| rcoveson wrote:
| I think the only way is to raise a generation of people who see
| data aggregation/brokerage and user-device-hijacking as
| immoral, much like how we raised people staring last century to
| view eugenics as immoral. The weird approach that Stallman has
| always taken is the only one that can win, as crazy as it
| seems.
|
| We need religious fervor. We need to decry bundling spyware and
| "analytics" with free alarm clock apps as evil. Finally, we
| need "know-it-when-I-see-it" type Software Decency laws that we
| can leverage to fine evildoers into oblivion (of course, those
| will follow automatically if we succeed in moralizing the
| issue).
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I agree with you in spirit, but eugenics was made immoral
| because it was directly linked to forced sterilization,
| murder, genocide, and so on.
|
| Data aggregation/brokerage has little such baggage in the
| public consciousness.
| rcoveson wrote:
| I unfortunately agree with you as well; it will probably
| take a world-scale horror story to ignite the anti-data-
| collection sentiment we need.
| jl2718 wrote:
| > ...Elon will do far worse things...
|
| Non-sequitur. The story is about middle management doing evil
| things for almost no incentive except a small pat on the back for
| padding a short-term revenue number, while the actual owner-
| leader who benefits the most shuts it down.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| This is just one reason why I _always_ prefer to use the website
| rather than an app.
|
| If I use the website I'm browsing on my terms: adblocking
| enabled, no location data, a lot less surface area for tracking.
|
| When you use the app then you're browsing on their terms:
| geolocation, tracking, ads, everything.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to
| shutting down. The 2016 election was the only thing that saved
| them and made them relevant again
|
| So in the Good Timeline there's no Twitter _and_ no President
| Trump?
| timr wrote:
| > I don't know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner
| of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things
| with the data.
|
| The story is interesting, but this line is petty. It's also more
| than a bit ironic, given that the OP just spent N tweets
| describing how the _previous_ management wasn 't exactly setting
| high ethical bars.
|
| The worst aspect of "Twitter culture" is the tendency --
| illustrated here, perfectly -- to slander people, just to make
| the mob shake their pitchforks harder.
|
| I sincerely hope Musk finds a way to fix that.
| giarc wrote:
| "I sincerely hope Musk finds a way to fix that."
|
| He's currently slandering people on the daily, so I doubt it.
| icare_1er wrote:
| Sounds like a good story for Darknet Diaries....
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > With Twitter's _change in ownership_ last week, I'm probably in
| the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to
| build while working at Twitter.
|
| Generally not true/safe. Any NDA still in effect would be
| transferred to the new owner. If the author genuinely believes
| this, they may want to delete this tweet asap. If it's just
| rhetorical, well ok then.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| He won the battle (pyrrhic-ly) but not the war. Fine grained
| location is commonly bought and sold in the USA:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v34a/fog-reveal-local-cops...
| scarface74 wrote:
| We need more government to protect involved in tech to protect
| our privacy!
|
| Oh wait, it's the government we need to be protected from.
| usednet wrote:
| Digital privacy is an illusion at this point. Our chips are
| backdoored, our fiber backbones are tapped, our VPNs are
| compromised, our forums are honeypots.
|
| I think the benefits of increased government regulation on
| digital privacy outweigh the potential abuses at this point.
| What more is there for the government to see? They have
| everything and more.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So you want to give the same government who is abusing
| power even more power?
| usednet wrote:
| Its not a question of abuse of power anymore. The PATRIOT
| Act has already given them unlimited power with no
| checks. Might as well have them use some of their power
| for something that benefits consumers.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Wouldn't it make more sense to start trying to take away
| power from the government then?
| ploum wrote:
| For one story like this which emerges because the engineer
| refused, how many stories we will never heard about because it
| was simply done?
|
| As software engineers, we are just like medical experts talking
| about the toxicity of cigarettes while ourselves buying
| cigarettes and distributing them to our own children.
| imiric wrote:
| > As software engineers, we are just like medical experts
| talking about the toxicity of cigarettes while ourselves buying
| cigarettes and distributing them to our own children.
|
| It's even worse than that. Most of the people working in adtech
| are actually producing cigarettes, and laughing all the way to
| the bank. Many of them are on this very site.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I probably sound like a green babe in the woods here, but I never
| go to Twit:
|
| WTF at this horrible format of having to break a blog post up
| into tiny bite sized pieces?? Why does anyone want to use this
| horrid platform? What was wrong with good old blog posts?
|
| Of course it is ridiculous, thus the need for a bot to assemble
| this shotgun of text bits: https://t.co/bQrFm4thI4
|
| What a joke!
| streblo wrote:
| > Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to
| shutting down.
|
| > Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money.
|
| I worked at Twitter at the same time, and while the company
| definitely was going through a rough patch at that time, it was
| absolutely not anywhere close to 'shutting down' or 'on its death
| bed' financially.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yeah this kind of thing is easily verifiable.. Per page 41 in
| their 2016 annual report, the balance of cash + short term
| equivalents went from $3.6 billion in 2014 to $3.5 billion in
| 2015 to $3.7 billion in 2016. Their annual GAAP loss was
| roughly 1/7th of that. Not the most profitable company in the
| world, but they had plenty of cash and hand and no real trouble
| fundraising.
| mdaniel wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html
| quadcore wrote:
| It's not explicitly said so I gota ask: it's illegal (in the
| U.S.) right?
| wmf wrote:
| No, sadly this is legal and most apps are doing it. Heck, the
| cellular carriers are directly selling your location regardless
| of what apps you use.
| rayiner wrote:
| Intriguing:
|
| > I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and
| puffing.
|
| > The Director said "We should know when users leave their house,
| their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day.
| Anything less is useless. _We get a lot more than that from other
| tech companies."_
|
| If they have so much data on us, why is the ad targeting so
| laughably bad? Facebook has recently been pushing me to watch
| Hocus Pocus 2. -_-
| stewx wrote:
| The Tim Hortons mobile app in Canada did this very thing:
| monitoring your GPS location 24/7, and logging special events
| when you entered a competitor's store, like Starbucks.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/investigation-finds-tim-h...
| chasd00 wrote:
| correct me if i'm wrong but won't your phone prompt you to
| explicitly allow access to a service when the app requests it?
| When the Tim Hortons app asks to use your location can't you
| Just Say No? ...or at most allow once.
| flutas wrote:
| > When the Tim Hortons app asks to use your location can't
| you Just Say No? ...or at most allow once.
|
| Let us know when you're in the drive through! Just say yes to
| this prompt.
|
| [location prompt]
|
| ===
|
| I've actually been curious about this for a bit, I need to
| dig in to some apps to see what they're doing. I've noticed,
| for example, the Chick-Fil-A app does that prompt, and then
| continues monitoring your location even after you've gotten
| your order and aren't near the restaurant anymore.
| evandale wrote:
| This article has more details of what they did and the little
| tap on the wrist our privacy commission gave them over it:
| https://globalnews.ca/news/8884583/tim-hortons-app-privacy-c...
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| The proposed settlement is absolutely insulting too. _A_ coffee
| and donut: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tim-hortons-
| app-1.6536175
| wilg wrote:
| Should at least have been a Starbucks coffee
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://nitter.net/stevekrenzel/status/1589700721121058817
|
| If you're not interested in visiting twitter directly.
| imron wrote:
| Nitter is best Twitter.
| fleddr wrote:
| This revelation just shows that doing the right thing depends on
| the accidental and rare "good guy" to hold their foot down. It's
| not something we can rely on.
|
| The Elon Musk burn in that sense is distracting. He hasn't done
| anything in this direction yet. He very well may, but he hasn't.
| So it's a false accusation/speculation.
|
| Counter to that, there is the _fact_ that Twitter 's legal and
| sales departments (pre-Musk) were totally cool with sending fine-
| grained location data to whoever pays for it.
|
| Controversy should focus on actual events, not imaginary ones. As
| such, old Twitter has some explaining to do and it's worrying
| that no actual Telco is named. Finally, a quote like "other tech
| companies give us far more" should launch a swarm of journalists
| to dig as deep as possible.
| skizm wrote:
| The worst part of these types of stories is every time I tell my
| non-tech friends and family about this stuff, the vast majority
| respond with: "so what?" They genuinely do not care about their
| own privacy from companies. Then they bash Facebook or who ever
| else is in the news most recently about misusing data and can't
| connect the dots. It really feels like a losing battle of trying
| to save people from themselves. :(
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don't
| underestimate the power of a pocket veto._
|
| This is something I've been repeating to some of my younger
| colleagues.
|
| Engineers aren't really fungible resources, to the extent that
| these projects require. Ask any manager how easy it is to swap
| "allocated resources", and they'll probably sigh heavily.
|
| People are afraid that if they don't follow their manager's every
| request, they will be fired. But remember that hiring is _hard_ ,
| and managers are loath to fire someone they've already spent so
| much effort finding, hiring, and onboarding. Finding someone else
| to do it can take weeks, months, or longer! Which in many cases
| risks killing the project altogether.
|
| Even if you're at the bottom of the chain, as the person who does
| the actual _implementation_ , you have a lot of power on what
| gets prioritized.
|
| See also the oft-circulated OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"
| http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabota...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > managers are loath to fire someone they've already spent so
| much effort finding, hiring, and onboarding
|
| Caveat: this applies to perms. It doesn't apply nearly as much
| to contractors (as my many experiences with saying "No, but..."
| to managers and being canned can attest.)
| antognini wrote:
| Reminds me a little of the story [1] about how in 2005 the
| execs at Google had a meeting to figure out what to call
| "Satellite View" in Google Maps. One faction did not like the
| name "Satellite View" because it was technically incorrect as
| many of the images had been taken from airplanes, not
| satellites. But the proposed alternatives like "Aerial
| photography" all sounded awkward. Right before the meeting
| ended Sergey Brin decided it would be called "Bird Mode."
|
| Later on when the engineering team was actually implementing it
| they thought Bird Mode sounded dumb and just called it
| Satellite View. And so it has been ever since.
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569
| tokai wrote:
| What are planes but slow satellites on a suborbital
| trajectory?
| inopinatus wrote:
| An object on a suborbital trajectory is by definition not a
| satellite.
|
| As a practical matter, there's a differing relationship
| with atmosphere. Planes depend on air to produce lift and
| sustain flight, but satellites are either inconvenienced by
| air, or entirely unaffected by it.
| ddalex wrote:
| Plane needs to burn energy to stay up there, the sattelite
| just ... sits in a curvature of space time...
| lovich wrote:
| Going down the captain pedant conversation path here, but
| technically all satellites also need to burn energy to
| stay in orbit or will eventually fall. The only ones who
| don't have achieved escape velocity
| adastra22 wrote:
| No, they don't. In the absence of drag, which only the
| lowest satellites have, they just stay up there forever.
| The fuel is needed for orbit changes and correcting drift
| due to gravitational instabilities.
| DFHippie wrote:
| IANAP ("I am not a physicist"), but any two objects in
| orbit around their common center of gravity are slowly
| radiating energy into space in the form of gravity waves.
| This is why LIGO reports its chirps. Of course, this
| isn't very much energy, but given enough time all should
| orbits collapse.
| drdeca wrote:
| Are any of them truly free of drag? Like, are there 0
| molecules of atmosphere at some height, or just entirely
| negligible amounts of atmosphere for all practical
| purposes?
| lovich wrote:
| And all the dragless satellites around the earth are
| focusing on documenting as all the frictionless spherical
| cows on the earth
| antognini wrote:
| To further add some (maybe helpful) pedantry, the
| boundary between an airplane and a satellite is usually
| taken to be the point at which the velocity required to
| remain aloft via aerodynamic lift exceeds the orbital
| velocity if there were no atmosphere.
| xypage wrote:
| Satellites also need to use some energy otherwise their
| orbit will eventually [0] bring them into atmosphere
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay
| Karellen wrote:
| Aren't satellites, by definition, orbital?
| edgefield wrote:
| Good story, but why not just call it "aerial view"?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why not just call it "aerial view"?_
|
| Some of the pictures were from satellites, not airplanes.
| montag wrote:
| Beautiful story. Incidentally, we now have Twitter rebranding
| Birdwatch as Community Notes...
| piva00 wrote:
| I have successfully implemented pocket vetoing at the most
| immoral company I worked for, it was a brief stint (caused by
| the moral issues) where I could play around not delivering all
| the features management wanted to gouge their customers by
| playing with other priorities.
|
| You don't need to do it, you don't even have to explicitly say
| no, you can just always find (or create) work that's more
| important to do than breaking your own morals. The worse that
| can happen is someone else gets the hot potato.
| notyourday wrote:
| > Engineers aren't really fungible resources, to the extent
| that these projects require. Ask any manager how easy it is to
| swap "allocated resources", and they'll probably sigh heavily.
|
| I'm hearing Meta, Stripe, Google, Netflix, Lyft and Uber are
| hiring like crazy for amazing salaries. Not only that but one
| basically just needs to sort of show up half the time and surf
| the net 99% of the time there.
|
| That was obviously sarcasm.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It depends on how junior the engineer is. My first job out of
| college, I was asked to write some code to cheat a benchmark,
| basically detect when a particular benchmark program was
| running and only then put the software into an alternate "fast
| path" that would result in better benchmark results. I agonized
| over this and didn't want to refuse. This was my first real job
| as a professional developer, and I didn't want to make waves.
| Eventually I got the nerve to tell my boss I was uncomfortable
| with the assignment, and he said "Oh, no problem at all! We
| keep our devs happy here." and assigned me onto another task.
| Joe, three cubicles down was more than happy to write the
| benchmark-cheating code.
| rtev wrote:
| You did the right thing. If more people spoke up and stood
| up, the world would be a much happier place.
| sebastiansm wrote:
| Some people don't need to stand up because they don't see
| any bad or evil in his work.
| koyote wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, why did the software not always use
| the 'fast path'?
| Infinity315 wrote:
| Probably more than likely it's not generalizable to real
| world conditions.
|
| Benchmarks are meant to be reproducible, meaning perfectly
| predictable. CPUs have things called branch predictors
| which try to predict what the software is going to do and
| try to do the calculation ahead of time resulting in
| (hopefully, if it predicted right) faster execution time.
| If you know which 'branches' a benchmark goes down, you can
| make a program which can coax the branch predictor to
| always make the right guesses for a given benchmark.
|
| A program branches whenever you encounter some sort of
| conditional if-else statement.
| galkk wrote:
| I'm not Musk fanboy, but the leap in the end to put the dirt on
| him is outrageous ("I don't know if this mindset will hold true
| with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do
| far worse things with the data.").
|
| Let me try to summarize what author actually said in the end: "I
| left, I sent email to then CEO of twitter and PER MY KNOWLEDGE
| the project was canned, I don't know if it actually was. But new
| guy still could do worse things".
|
| If you're so moral, why not blow whistle to public when you left
| previously, and not write unsubstantiated claims about new owner
| now.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Ex-Twitter employees blowing the whistle on the highly dodgy
| stuff they were asked to do during The Time when Twitter Was
| The Best Twitter and somehow attributing it to The Dark Now-
| Times Of Current Twitter is very 2022.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| cauthon wrote:
| I don't perceive the original author to be "putting the dirt"
| on Musk.
|
| It is likely that the third-party partners who were interested
| in collecting that data remain interested. The leadership who
| formerly blocked access to that data has left, and the new
| ownership finds himself in need of new revenue streams. It
| seems like a reasonable time to call attention to the issue,
| though I agree with others in the thread that it should be a
| larger story not specific to a single platform.
| bogwog wrote:
| > If you're so moral, why not blow whistle to public when you
| left previously, and not write unsubstantiated claims about new
| owner now.
|
| The first tweet in that thread:
|
| > With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in
| the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to
| build while working at Twitter.
|
| IMO this guy demonstrated an incredible amount of personal
| integrity here. He likely could have made a lot of money by
| building this out, but decided not to because he knew it was
| wrong.
|
| This is why we need more laws and government regulation: people
| that do the right thing like this are very rare. Typical
| incentive structures don't optimize for these types of people,
| so legal ones need to exist to limit the damage that the
| inevitable bad apples will do.
| alexb_ wrote:
| "We should know when users leave their house, their commute to
| work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is
| useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies."
|
| This should be posted absolutely everywhere with _this_ as the
| hook. This type of request and the admittance that _companies
| give even more than that all the time_ is headline news worthy.
| languageserver wrote:
| I do not trust this story. Seems way too absurd to happen in
| the 2010's. Literally just some guy (tm) on Twitter saying it
| scarface74 wrote:
| Why wouldn't you believe this was happening? Facebook bought
| a VPN provider with the explicit purpose of spying on its
| users and both Facebook and Google convinced users to use
| what was suppose to be an internal Enterprise Certificate to
| track users until Apple threaten to cancel the certificate.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-
| googl...
|
| But Twitter had been tracking apps installed on a users
| iPhone until Apple restricted access to the API that they
| used.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-
| the...
|
| The purpose of the API was for one app to send messages to
| another app. But it could be used to tell if an app was
| installed.
| jabyess wrote:
| which part seems unbelievable to you?
| [deleted]
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Healthy dose of mistrust is warranted. Still, would it really
| shock if it were true? In my eyes, it would only confirm what
| I already know.
| cpeterso wrote:
| For example, if the telco is already getting "a lot more than
| that from other tech companies", why do they also need
| Twitter's user location data? I understand "more is more",
| but the telco in the story sounded desperate to obtain
| Twitter's data.
| itronitron wrote:
| 2015 to be precise, which is fairly late in the game. I was
| at a conference a few years prior to that and some guy was
| bragging about all the stuff they can find out about people
| based on their data this and data that.
|
| There is some obsession amongst a subset of techies with
| knowing everything, and that extends to the daily minutiae of
| the lives of others.
| kkfx wrote:
| I suggest you to think a bit about the context:
|
| - the location logs would be collected by a simple application,
| witch imply the phone/phone OS itself can do that;
|
| - they do refuse, Legal teams do not, but nothing state they
| can't satisfy the request TECHNICALLY.
|
| In other words when people tend to disagree with my
| consideration of smartphone as macro-spy devices bought and
| kept up by those who get spied as opposite of classic spying
| gears should think about not only that, but what they do with
| their (well, not really their, since they are just formal but
| powerless owners) phones, things like pay taxes, act on their
| banks accounts, pre-heat/cool their cars etc.
|
| Because such activities have a FAR bigger impact than mere
| position logs.
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect other tech companies were _claiming_ that they would
| have this granularity _eventually_ but never actually
| delivered. One of the things that happens at these (and the
| fact that he didn 't "hear this" until on site) is that Sales
| promises everything with a flashy powerpoint, and then what is
| actually delivered is a "if someone tweets in the Verizon store
| and uses Verizon in the tweet, you can put an ad on that".
| aorloff wrote:
| No, there are dozens of companies that have this data.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| Can you cite?
| rbetts wrote:
| It's hearsay said by an antagonist during a negotiation. This
| quote isn't by itself trustworthy enough to be news.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Name and shame them.
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| I would have thought that a mobile telco could generate this
| data already just from what they need to route data (and voice
| calls) to each phone, at least to a somewhat coarse level,
| without needing to have apps upload this.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Yeah, they _have_ to be able to. Something about this story
| just doesn 't add up unless this is explained.
| sp332 wrote:
| Yeah but they actually got in trouble for selling that so
| many times they have backed off. https://www.theregister.com/
| 2022/09/02/us_carriers_fcc_data_...
| [deleted]
| philjohn wrote:
| It's most likely that the Telco Director was lying out of his
| posterior, trying to scare Twitter into doing what they wanted
| with vague threats of "your competitor will get this money
| otherwise".
|
| It's called a bluff.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| What angers me the most about this, is this type of topic is
| exactly what should be taught in a required class on ethics for
| engineering degrees, but is completely missing.
| imgabe wrote:
| I had to take an ethics course as part of an engineering
| degree. This was before mobile apps really existed so it
| didn't include an example like this. Don't most schools
| require an ethics course?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| What was in your engineering ethics course, then? Ours was
| pretty much summarized by "Rich assholes will try to convince
| your boss to convince you to do some evil shit in the name of
| money. It is your obligation to reject such requests".
| Followed by a painful amount of tragic examples. Like, this
| may have been the only message of the entire course. The
| Ethics course in the Philosophy department was way more
| engaging, because it had a bit more variety.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I'm not sure how much that helps unless there is also some
| sort of protection for engineers who refuse to behave
| unethically.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Yes it should be semester 1 in every single CS and SE course.
|
| Sadly, there are very few resources; textbooks and professors
| qualified in software engineering and ethics, and the
| adjacent political, social and economic realms to fill this.
|
| I'm really, honestly doing my best with this problem.
|
| The subject area is massive. The issues are horrendously
| complex. The targets keep moving (each day we seem to set a
| new bar for what shitfuckery is acceptable).
|
| Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not
| prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily
| hard (and it makes it worse that I am an opinionated bastard)
|
| HN remains one of my best resources for "pragmatic" ethics,
| and so I thank you all.
| Macha wrote:
| I know it certainly was coverd in mine, it shared half a
| module with academic writing.
|
| But I think by the time of starting third level education,
| something like this is too late to change someone's moral
| decision making, so I don't really think it had any effect
| on anyone in that course.
| unequiv88 wrote:
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not
| prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily
| hard
|
| Ethics and personal values are the same thing. It would be
| impossible to write a book on Ethics for [any audience]
| that didn't consist entirely of personal values. Similarly,
| since ethics are necessarily subjective, it is impossible
| to write about ethics in a non-prescriptive way.
| mkipper wrote:
| Engineering programs do include a required ethics class. But
| with a cynical lens, it's only required because the bodies
| that license engineers and permit them to practice require
| that course in order for a school's degrees to be accredited.
| Once an engineering graduate is licensed and practicing,
| they're on the hook to follow a standard of practice that
| includes ethics. If they violate that, their licensing body
| has the legal teeth to punish them in a variety of ways (e.g.
| fines, removing their license). Also, employers who do
| engineering work have to agree to a similar deal with the
| licensing body. If they force engineers to act unethically,
| those engineers can report them to the licensing body who
| also has the legal teeth to go after them in a variety of
| ways. It's not a pretty system but it generally does an okay
| job.
|
| The ethics course itself is a very small piece of the puzzle.
| Even if every software engineer had to take an ethics course,
| there's still a huge power imbalance between the average
| engineer and their employer. Ethics are great and all, but
| without a legally backed standard of practice to protect
| those engineers, widespread violations are more or less
| inevitable. You can stand up and refuse to do work because it
| goes against what you learned in your ethics class, but your
| employer can just find someone who doesn't feel as strongly
| about that. That still happens in traditional engineering
| fields, but there's at least a legal/regulatory framework in
| place to discourage it.
|
| Some jurisdictions "solve" this by lumping software
| engineering in with other disciplines and making the same
| licensing bodies deal with it. This is also a big mess. Those
| bodies are normally led by "traditional" engineers who barely
| understand software, their standards/legislation were written
| before software-specific issues (e.g. mass surveillance) were
| relevant, and their processes don't move fast enough to deal
| with a rapidly changing field like software engineering. It
| may be possible to fix all this or create similar
| organizations and legislation specific to software, but it's
| not trivial.
| anfilt wrote:
| Agreed!
| colinmhayes wrote:
| What I'm confused by is why the telco needs twitter to get that
| info. I work for a data warehousing/sql consultancy and our
| biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in order
| to comply with subpoenas. They already have all the data about
| where every one of their users has been.
| WWLink wrote:
| Not trying to defend the telcos, but I think they're trying
| to figure out where to prioritize upgrading their
| infrastructure based on where their customers spend most of
| their time - and more importantly, where their COMPETITORS'
| CUSTOMERS spend most of their time.
|
| If they know that, they can target those areas and then
| heavily advertise that they have better service than their
| competitors in those areas lol.
|
| Historically they could do that by old fashioned research and
| surveying. But that's expensive. I imagine getting this data
| from everyones' phones is a lot cheaper and easier.
|
| If that's the case, I don't think their desire is necessarily
| _evil_, but very misguided lol.
| [deleted]
| Arwill wrote:
| The way i understood it, they wanted to track their
| competitors users.
| amitamit wrote:
| The "native" location data that Telcos have is not very
| precise - think of accuracy of a few city blocks. That is
| good enough precision for traditional subpoenas, but not for
| the kind of application the author described.
|
| Also telcos only have data for their customers - this gets
| them access to competitors' customers.
| jojobas wrote:
| Since at least 3g there is a capability to request the
| phone to report GPS location to the telco. There is even a
| capability to override disabled GPS before doing that,
| presumably reserved for law enforcement/search and rescue.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > The "native" location data that Telcos have is not very
| precise
|
| _Was_ not very precise. One of the "advantages" of 5G is
| a lot higher resolution for telcos. And I think even 4G was
| superior to "a few city blocks"
|
| > telcos only have data for their customers - this gets
| them access to competitors' customers.
|
| And this is the true reason for the request.
| amitamit wrote:
| Good point. Cellular accuracy has improved dramatically
| since 2015.
| beauzero wrote:
| With 4G the problem has been "what lane are you in?". One
| of the things that can be done with that data... If you
| can figure out what lane a user is in, you can target
| (visually) digital billboards to that lane, covering all
| lanes with different images/ads, through some weird
| refraction. I knew of a company that was working on that
| problem 8-10 years ago out of the South. No idea if they
| solved the problem.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| The screen has been figured out. Misapplied Sciences is
| already installing these screens in airports for a trial
| program with Delta.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Are you talking about this?
|
| _A mind-bending digital info screen, developed in
| partnership with Misapplied Sciences and dubbed Parallel
| Reality, will debut in beta form on June 29 near the
| Delta Sky Club in Concourse A of the McNamara Terminal._
|
| _According to a news release, numerous passengers can
| look at the same screen at once, and each passenger will
| see personalized flight information that the other people
| looking at the screen will not see, because they 'll be
| looking at their own personalized flight info._
|
| _The Parallel Reality display conveys the same sort of
| stuff you find on traditional airport screens--about
| departure times, gate numbers, baggage carousel
| locations, and so on--but you don 't have to scan lists
| of data because the screen semi-magically shows you only
| what you're looking for, while up to 100 other people are
| simultaneously looking at the same screen semi-magically
| showing them what they're looking for._
|
| https://www.frommers.com/blogs/passportable/blog_posts/de
| lta...
| chrononaut wrote:
| > our biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in
| order to comply with subpoenas.
|
| Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't understand the
| intersection of why telco's are involved in serving subpoenas
| and the need to know the physical location of users. Are you
| referring to a log of networks / DHCP leases their customers
| were using at any given time?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Not serving subpoenas, responding to them. Police subpoena
| stuff like "everyone who was within x feet of this phone
| number or location between these times" and the telcos
| can't just say "we don't keep that data."
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| ...why not? Is there a federal law compelling then to
| record and store precise location data indefinitely?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's a legal requirement or they just
| don't want to upset law enforcement. I guess maybe
| they're just keeping the data for other reasons and then
| law enforcement is jumping on that. All I know is they're
| using our data warehouse and having me write queries that
| answer those subpoenas when they come in.
|
| Well I know that in the UK it is a legal requirement, but
| not sure about the US.
| novok wrote:
| Subpoenas are based on information you have. Where is the
| law or regulation that says they need to keep it?
|
| Telcos keep it because it helps them with network
| capacity planning and is incredibility financially
| lucrative when they want to sell the data. It's probably
| more to fill in their data product for malls and fine
| grained location than to do it for subpoenas, which if
| they had a choice would probably rather not have to do.
| djbusby wrote:
| And CDR and LUD. Call Data Records (numbers, time,
| duration) and Local Usage Detail (they use "LUDs" on TV)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.
|
| Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these
| tech companies are sharing? As much as I've heard about data
| collection and sharing by big tech, I feel like I don't see
| much in the way of samples or example data. Even the forced
| GDPR data releases I've seen haven't been extraordinarily in-
| depth. Surely there must be some articles out there that I'm
| missing?
| brigade wrote:
| Sure: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business
| /loca...
|
| It's simple - an app asks for background location
| permissions, then uploads all the datapoints and timestamps
| the OS gives them to their servers, which is then resold with
| "anonymization" that just replaces any personal information
| with an impersonal unique identifier.
|
| That's the reason Apple/Google have clamped down so hard on
| location permissions since then. But even a degraded dataset
| is still valuable -
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-
| to...
| datalopers wrote:
| Lots of entities sell this, right now:
|
| * https://www.advanresearch.com/
|
| * https://www.placer.ai/
|
| * https://www.onemata.com/
|
| * https://www.safegraph.com/
|
| It comes from the telcos directly (think Sprint phones with
| custom OS installs), it comes from popular mobile SDKs (e.g.
| why Yahoo bought Flurry), and it comes from apps who simply
| sell the data directly.
|
| There is one journalist who actively covers this sort of
| PII/data-selling world: Joseph Cox at Vice [1]. The only US-
| based legislator who actively fights against this is Senator
| Wyden.
|
| [1] https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/joseph-cox
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what
| these tech companies are sharing?
|
| I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times,
| often multiple times on the same companies up and down every
| level of the stack".
|
| And some of the companies _brag_ about their abilities. There
| was some surveillance company which was showing how Covid
| spread after spring break in Florida by gleefully posting
| screenshots from their tool that tracks individual phone
| locations.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times,
| often multiple times on the same companies up and down
| every level of the stack".
|
| Do you have a link? It's always sort of discussed as if
| everyone knows exactly what's happening, but I'm
| specifically looking for links that break it down.
| sroussey wrote:
| It's data brokers they are talking about.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| This is why I never use native apps on my phone. The experience
| sucks but I muddle through using the web for reading Twitter,
| reddit, etc.
|
| I am constantly, constantly bombarded with "this looks better
| in the app! please just run our app!!" as I browse. Still I
| refuse--with the web I at least know they can't harvest
| information about everything I'm doing. There are still some
| privacy concerns of course but it's much better to have the web
| as a firewall of sorts.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I typically prefer app UI and use permissions to control my
| data. If I set iOS to deny location data to Twitter, then
| Twitter cannot log my location even if the mobile app runs
| code to do so.
|
| There is a lot that a website can do to profile you too.
| gernb wrote:
| There is absolutely nothing a website can do that an app
| can't. Apps can do more to profile you than a website.
| subsubzero wrote:
| same, my Wife who has 2-3 dozen apps is asking me why do you
| not use apps?(I have <10 apps on my phone) and I said I do
| not trust my data for one second with alot of these
| unscrupulous apps. I have a strong bias towards privacy -
| caveat emptor.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| It's gross because that's exactly why they ask you to
| install.
|
| "This looks better in the app" because they sabotage the web
| experience so they can do this very thing.
| kibwen wrote:
| Seconded. Nearly no apps are doing anything that warrants a
| "native" experience, they're glorified document viewers and
| form fields. Fuck 'em, I'd rather stop using a service than
| install an app.
| samwillis wrote:
| Twitter and (old)reddit are better as mobile websites in
| every way.
|
| We have 30 years of browser UX development, culminating in
| tabs and multitasking tools that allow you to open things to
| read later, wait while they load on a slow connection or form
| a queue of things to read.
|
| Mobile apps for every social media site loose all of that.
| They are worse than useless. There is this internal fear at
| social media companies, they want to prevent their users
| leaving their little walled garden. That or the religious
| drive for managers to reach target metrics creates a net
| negative feedback loop for user satisfaction.
|
| Social media apps have _no_ multitasking features (at least
| last time I used them). It 's absurd.
|
| I've only used the twitter mobile website for the last three
| years. Will never install the app again.
|
| (Aside: my (ridiculous) conspiracy theory is that React
| Native is an attempt to distract developers from the
| advantages of a WebView based app development process that
| would eventually lead to the success of PWAs, locking devs
| into the app stores as a distribution channel)
| rektide wrote:
| It's incredibly interesting that consumer operating systems
| have done nothing to try to catch the web browsing
| experience. They've let themselves go no where. Tabs,
| multi-document interfaces, managing many files at once, is
| just not something the OS is good at.
|
| I remember the couple months or years where each Chrome tab
| was it's own app instance. I thought it was incredibly
| ambitious & interesting to make the OS try to deal with
| tabs, be a manager. And indeed Google backed it out. And so
| as usual, Android is in the background of daily life,
| hardly ever touched or used, and I just stay in Chrome
| almost all day letting it define every bit of my computing
| existence.
|
| The web experience just has so many more hooks & so much
| more power, than these little self-defined bespoke inward
| experiences. Because so much part because browser gives us
| such basic & flexibility utility as we compute & surf.
|
| Thanks for the good post, enjoyed reading very much, & two
| thumbs up!
| spoils19 wrote:
| As someone who disables JavaScript while browsing, I find it
| disappointing that you are encouraging more developers to
| build web apps rather than a native experience.
| hollasch wrote:
| If you disable JavaScript while browsing but recommend that
| people install mobile apps, that's kind of like forbidding
| pocket knifes in a war zone.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Who said websites have to use JS? Your argument is
| orthogonal to companies using apps to harvest user
| information, and being blocked by web platform there.
| There's no reason Facebook, Twitter, etc. has to use
| JavaScript in their web experience.
| tremon wrote:
| You actually prefer when your phone runs native stalking
| code that you can't inspect or block?
| falcolas wrote:
| I can't really inspect or block things in the iPhone
| browser either. The javascript is opaque and I can't
| easily inspect what it's doing or what it sends.
|
| Web apps have a lot of access to your data as well,
| especially your location data.
| kibwen wrote:
| Not if you deny the sites access to your location data,
| the permission for which is denied-by-default and is
| never, ever actually necessary for anything.
| NTARelix wrote:
| My android phone's apps must ask for permission to use some
| of this data (location, microphone, filesystem, etc.), and
| android provides the options "always", "only when using the
| app", "this time only", and "never"; which seems to help with
| this problem, though I'm sure it's nowhere near a silver
| bullet. When I leave my home I only feel (mostly) untracked
| if I do so without my phone and only buy things with cash,
| which is almost non-existent behavior for myself and the
| people I know.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| The funniest thing is that this trickles down to small SAAS
| companies, all of whom think they need two native apps.
| Talking to them about it is illuminating. Their app doesn't
| need to:
|
| - use bluetooth, accelerometer data, or anything else not
| exposed to a browser
|
| - spy on their user closely to generate valuable data (your
| app is the product, not the user)
|
| - be discovered in the apple or google app stores. Relatively
| expensive, niche, high touch, business to business apps are
| not impulse buys for bored managing directors.
|
| And their dev team is usually already over burdened just
| dealing with the web stuff.
|
| But still they pour money into the two native apps bucket.
| Before they're even profitable...
|
| I wonder how much this "IT LOOKS BETTER IN THE APP"
| propaganda is affecting their business sense. Twitter and
| Facebooks business model is _a bit different_ from B2B SAAS
| SME.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| As an aside, if you use iOS, Banish will nuke those "open in
| app" popups. Costs one $2 payment, which I was more than
| happy to give to a dev working on a useful product. Works
| very well, and gets updated quickly when it doesn't.
|
| https://getbanish.com/
| aorloff wrote:
| This ! ^^
| legohead wrote:
| He could have been bluffing with that statement. If he already
| gets it, what does he need twitter for?
| jsnell wrote:
| Even if we assume that the OP is telling exactly what happened
| rather than exaggerating (stories do tend to grow in the
| telling over 8 years), we don't actually know that this alleged
| data selling happened. All he knows is that somebody at a telco
| with an interest in getting Twitter's data claimed that the
| telco got more data from other companies. What other companies?
| No details. What data? No details. Was the guy from the telco
| telling the truth, or lying since that furthered their agenda?
| We have no way of judging that, and neither did the OP.
|
| Spamming this submission with that hook (rather than the parts
| that the OP had actual direct knowledge of) is basically just
| spreading misinformation.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It's also, at best, a claim made by a (presumably non-
| technical) employee of one of these Big Tech companies'
| clients. It's entirely possible that they were able to
| _benefit from_ the data that Google, Facebook, whatever
| collects while not having direct access to it in any form.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| You think it's true taht they get a lot more than that from
| "other tech companies"? (who is that? Facebook? Tik-tok?)
|
| (As an aside, it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in
| ownership somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside
| details, but I'm glad he did)
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Your (U.S.A.) cell network provider sells your location. No
| need for apps!
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| In this case wasn't it was a cell network provider wanting
| the info from twitter? why'd they want it if they already
| have it?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Probably to correlate Twitter user names with telco
| customers.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Oh, wow. I didn't even think the request included Twitter
| handles.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| They (the telcos) only have stats on their customers.
| Twitter has it for anyone running twitter. Further,
| twitters location data is likely more accurate than the
| telco due to positioning from stuff like wifi names,
| local gps, etc.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in ownership
| somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside details
|
| If the change in ownership means "I am never going back, time
| to set that bridge on fire" he's absolutely right it's
| "safer". Or simply if he thinks "It is now acceptable to
| future employers to do this", it is also safer.
|
| Or maybe it was something that he now sees as a greater
| threat, and therefore is worth mentioning even if is not
| safer or even riskier.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I think it was just a bluff.
| modriano wrote:
| I assume most free weather app companies make money nearly
| exclusively by selling user location data.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Some context for those who skipped the article: The major telco
| said other tech companies regularly collect and sell them this
| type of granular data harvested from users' phones.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Many free wifi places will track and report movements with
| the wifi area. Using bluetooth in addition. Shopping malls in
| particular can use this to find where people congregate.
|
| Can probably be related to email addresses too, and hence
| shared with every other mall with same ownership as well as
| the company that provides the free wifi.
|
| e.g. Aruba, Meraki, ...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Maybe they were getting this from some ad networks like
| Taboola or Outbrain - but then those networks don't usually
| have enough info to really identify you.
|
| Sure, if they were giving your IP to a telCo who can map your
| IP to a name if you're a customer - that's identifying you.
|
| It's HIGHLY unlikely this happened at the usual suspects
| (FAANG).
| DaveMebs wrote:
| You think it is highly unlikely that Facebook/Meta is
| selling granular user data?
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| Even economically, it seems unlikely they would. The data
| is their moat and it's what they can use to target people
| with ads. Selling it seems counterproductive.
| jsnell wrote:
| Yes, it's incredibly unlikely. So unlikely that it's
| basically impossible.
|
| They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that
| was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and
| public backlash. (Think of what happened with the
| Cambridge Analytica case, despite Facebook's hands being
| pretty clean on that). No disgruntled ex-employees blew
| the whistle on this but did on other issue), which
| suggests it probably didn't happen.
|
| Selling ads is very profitable. Selling data directly
| risks that business for little gain. In addition to the
| backlash when that data selling were revealed, it risks
| somebody else using the data sold by Meta to outcompete
| them on ad targeting.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it risks somebody else using the data sold by Meta to
| outcompete them on ad targeting_
|
| Bingo. They're unlikely to be selling the data because
| those data are their secret sauce. They are as
| economically incentivized to build sociopathic models on
| you as they are to keep your data out of anyone else's
| hands.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that
| was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and
| public backlash.
|
| Companies typically don't admit to the public when
| they're engaged in unethical practices. Purdue Pharma is
| a good example.
| jsnell wrote:
| Then you say nothing on the subject, or say something
| that's technically true but ambiguous and easy to
| misunderstand.
| itronitron wrote:
| I also assume that Elon and his backers will do far worse things
| with Twitter users' data.
| leobg wrote:
| What makes you think that? In contrast to Alexa, my Tesla does
| not show me any ads. And I've also not been followed around by
| ads targeted based on places I have driven by, eben though that
| would be a low hanging fruit if Tesla was run by Zuckerberg or
| Bezos.
| woodruffw wrote:
| "Selling ads" is not the appropriate analogue here. It's
| selling _precise location data_. Tesla apparently does not
| _currently_ sell location data from its vehicles, but it's
| not inconceivable that they will one day, whether or not you
| perceive it in the form of in-car ads.
| EricE wrote:
| I'm no fan of Tesla, but they area hardly unique in having
| a car with an embedded cellular modem that is in constant
| communication back to the mothership. Indeed I challenge
| you to find ANY car for sale today that isn't automatically
| tethered to it's manufacturer. It's also why I have zero
| desire to change any of my older cars for something
| "better". I wish I could find a site that would catalog
| which cars out there can have their embedded cellular
| modems disabled and not freakout/threaten to stop working.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Certainly not. In this regard, Tesla is no worse (and
| very possibly better) than most other manufacturers. My
| point was about potential and future profit; that kind of
| data is hard to resist in a less hospitable market.
|
| Were I to own a car, I'd probably in the same boat as
| you.
| mymyairduster wrote:
| Just wait until he starts putting twitter front and center in
| the infotanment system
| hersko wrote:
| Why?
| netsharc wrote:
| I'm not the grandparent poster, but maybe the answer is
| "there are 44 billion reasons and 1 impulsive guy at the
| helm"...
| itronitron wrote:
| because they can
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Because to some, myself included, Elon has not shown to have
| any ethical guidance other than self enrichment.
|
| Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology
| doesn't seem like they'd have too much problem selling people
| out.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I would make this argument for all of silicon valley. We
| know for a fact Google and Facebook sell people out,
| actively, right now. We also know pre-Musk Twitter had a
| host of internal issues and questionable ethics.
| memish wrote:
| https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
| EricE wrote:
| >Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology
|
| Your referring to Twitter pre Musk, and not Musk, right?
| xrd wrote:
| Anyone using social media services need to pay attention to this
| story. When the profit margins shift ever so slightly, or say
| massively like with the Apple changes, then these companies will
| take meetings with executives like this Telco who wanted data on
| when people are going into their competitors stores.
| Unbelievable, or should I say, totally believable and totally
| expected.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| This really isn't a just for _Twitter_ ; this is the danger of
| selling any application with a large install-base. Doesn't really
| matter if it's a social network app, borderline-useless mobile
| app, Facebook App (I'm looking at you, Cambridge Analytica),
| chrome extension, or pypi/npm module, all of these things are
| _capable_ of collecting extremely fine-grained user detail, and
| selling it off.
|
| It doesn't matter if the current owners don't/won't do it, there
| is essentially nothing that prevents someone else from buying it
| up, and doing nefarious things with the existing install base.
|
| And as far as "Terms of Service" go, there is essentially nothing
| to prevent a future owner from updating the Terms of Service, and
| then doing the above.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| Finally, someone who quit.
|
| So many of these stories are from someone who built the thing,
| profited, left, and then took up a new chapter of their career
| talking about how everything they did at <BAD COMPANY> was bad
| and that they should now receive funding, back pats, and NPR
| airtime for their new <GOOD COMPANY>.
|
| My question is always: "So, are you going to give the money
| back?"
|
| There really is a middle ground between just following orders and
| dedicating your life to sabotaging a company from the inside
| because someone once thought about doing something that didn't
| 100% align with your personal mission and you weren't going to
| have it.
|
| You can refuse and you can quit.
|
| More people need to read books on engineering ethics.
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