Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#281

Post by curare » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

At a previous employer we used the data referenced in the question. We bought the "anonymised" telecom data from one of the big providers in the USA. We would then analyse that data to figure out where the phone spent 6-8 hours during the night to determine where the phone owner lived. Then we'd pull the USA consensus data(free!) so the system would know what demographic the user probably belongs to. We got a surprising amount of data from the consensus, we had things like ethnicity, income, age.

Then we'd loaded all this in google maps and let users of the app figure out what demographics frequent particular locations on the map. For example a use-case of this would be a coffee company figuring out where to open a new coffee shop.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#282

Post by fao_ » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

King-Aaron wrote: post #270

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be someone who can find a moral reason that such systems need to exist. Engineers build weapons, after all.

There will also always be someone else to do the work if you don't. Some people just like to eat.

Just because someone is willing to, say, torture a rat, I should be the one to do it? That's a non-sequitur.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#283

Post by ryan-allen » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:02 AM UTC

eof wrote: post #65

Very short backstory: I was very severely punished for breaking security on our pcs at school (utilizing interactive startup on windows 95 to not start the "fortress" process.) For a final project presented which was ostensibly a limited auto-translation application, I made an application which just popped up an alert, "program unable to run due to security" Got an A!

Our school spent loads of money security their network with some Novel boot thingo. I bashed in some DOS interrupt keystrokes and was able to bypass it completely.

The whole class was playing networked DOOM about 10 minutes later.

I thought I was going to get suspended or expelled, but instead the teacher in charge of IT came to me and said "I know you did it, if you show me how you did it you wont get in trouble."

The look of disappointment on his face when he saw how easy it was... I'll never forget it. I wonder how much the school paid for that 'security' :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#284

Post by hnzix » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:02 AM UTC

scott-smith_us wrote: post #178

There was an ongoing prank in my high school (late 70's) to insert John Holmes' name whenever/wherever possible. For example, one trick was to ask someone in the front office to add to the end-of-day announcements "{popular girl}, John Holmes won't be able to give you a ride today". Eventually the front office caught on, and it got riskier and more difficult to do. I was asked to write an Applesoft BASIC program to h…

Did you get busted?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#285

Post by api_or_ipa » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:03 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #224

dopeboy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got an extra day for an out of memory exception? I wish I was that lucky

Yeah, not successfully compiling and running was an automatic fail in my school.

If it didn't cleanly compile and run on linux, it was a autofail. I found a discrepancy in MPICH2 the hard way: it would correctly implement my leader election on my mac, and on my little raspberry pi, but not on a Solaris linux!

Lost 5% of my grade to that bug.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#286

Post by powvans » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:03 AM UTC

austhrow743 wrote: post #228

powvans wrote: post #201

I helped build Grindr, which of course I don't think was unethical. But I've been surprised by some people's reaction to it. It generally comes up in some conversation where someone asks "what have you worked on that I might have heard of?" Occasionally they follow up with (paraphrasing) "how do you sleep at night?"

Grindr the service isn't unethical but I recall a thing about them having a lot of third party tracking. Which given the nature of the service seems to me way worse than tracking elsewhere on the internet. Know anything about that or the extent of it?

I don't know anything about the current architecture or third party trackers. It's been over five years since I did any work with Grindr.

I will say that when I worked on Grindr, Joel (CEO, founder) was adamant that we would not track location history. We only stored the most recent location we received from a user.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#287

Post by 0x00000000 » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:05 AM UTC

northwest65 wrote: post #137

I was subcontracted as development resource to a short terms loan company. They had me implement a piece of software that lets people enter their online banking details (yes their name and password, that thing that the bank says if you reveal to anybody you have no protections on your account), store them in a database, and then use those credentials to scrape their bank records so that their loans could be approved…

Paypal does this. I don't know how it's legal or your bank doesn't care.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#288

Post by powvans » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

knuththetruth wrote: post #202

powvans wrote: post #201

I helped build Grindr, which of course I don't think was unethical. But I've been surprised by some people's reaction to it. It generally comes up in some conversation where someone asks "what have you worked on that I might have heard of?" Occasionally they follow up with (paraphrasing) "how do you sleep at night?"

Out of curiosity - was this because of their homophobia or something else? I’ve read they’ve been terrible about data security.

The former. I wondered if the comment might be misconstrued. These were cases of individuals revealing their prejudices.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#289

Post by netaustin » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:07 AM UTC

After Jared Kushner originally bought the New York Observer, I was hired to lead the tech team, which I did for a year and a half in house then for three more as a vendor. He asked me, out of band, to blackhole articles critical of his commercial real estate colleagues and I complied.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#290

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:14 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #238

scott-smith_us wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think they could have charged for less than the full month. The goodwill and trust that would have engendered would probably have been more than worth it in the long run.

Absolutely not. The client will either take you as shady or incompetent for being that much wrong in your estimate.

[deleted]