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What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

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Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#51

Post by zem »

soulchild37 wrote: post #37
zem wrote: post #25

apart from the obvious malware, i will not work on drm, surveillance, spam, and anything that depends on addicting people to in-app purchases. i would like not to work at all for companies employing dark patterns, even if i don't work on those parts of the code myself, but realistically i tend to settle for not doing anything sketchy myself, and working for companies that i see as delivering positive value overall.

I work as a full time mobile dev and my primary task is to implement dark design pattern to increase number of in-app purchase made by user, it's agonizing to go to work every day but the salary is quite decent

that's pretty sad :( have you looked out for other work, or just let it slide?

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#52

Post by tptacek »

* End-user monitoring / surveillance (I started my career with a paper motivated by how skeeved out I was by IPWatcher: http://cs.unc.edu/~fabian/course_papers/PtacekNewsham98.pdf)

* Anything for DoD (or any country's Dept. of Defense)

* Casinos

* Weapons

That might be about it. I could, situationally, be comfortable working on:

* DRM/content protection

* HFT

* Some aspects of adtech

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#53

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #52

* End-user monitoring / surveillance (I started my career with a paper motivated by how skeeved out I was by IPWatcher: http://cs.unc.edu/~fabian/course_papers/PtacekNewsham98.pdf ) * Anything for DoD (or any country's Dept. of Defense) * Casinos * Weapons That might be about it. I could, situationally, be comfortable working on: * DRM/content protection * HFT * Some aspects of adtech

I'm curious why casinos are on the list?

I'm generally not a good barometer apparently given my work in HFT & adtech, but I'd think building a sports book would be fairly interesting & not evil.

Things I think are a shade past where I want to be: high risk consumer credit, for profit prisons, private military contractors & pyramid marketing schemes.

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#54

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #52

* End-user monitoring / surveillance (I started my career with a paper motivated by how skeeved out I was by IPWatcher: http://cs.unc.edu/~fabian/course_papers/PtacekNewsham98.pdf ) * Anything for DoD (or any country's Dept. of Defense) * Casinos * Weapons That might be about it. I could, situationally, be comfortable working on: * DRM/content protection * HFT * Some aspects of adtech

[deleted]

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#55

Post by tptacek »

kasey_junk wrote: post #53
tptacek wrote: post #52

* End-user monitoring / surveillance (I started my career with a paper motivated by how skeeved out I was by IPWatcher: http://cs.unc.edu/~fabian/course_papers/PtacekNewsham98.pdf ) * Anything for DoD (or any country's Dept. of Defense) * Casinos * Weapons That might be about it. I could, situationally, be comfortable working on: * DRM/content protection * HFT * Some aspects of adtech

I'm curious why casinos are on the list? I'm generally not a good barometer apparently given my work in HFT & adtech, but I'd think building a sports book would be fairly interesting & not evil. Things I think are a shade past where I want to be: high risk consumer credit, for profit prisons, private military contractors & pyramid marketing schemes.

I wouldn't work on high-risk consumer credit either (I assume there aren't many coding jobs in the prison industry).

My problem with casinos is the same as your issue with high risk consumer credit. You're right: there may be exceptions.

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#56

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #55
kasey_junk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why casinos are on the list? I'm generally not a good barometer apparently given my work in HFT & adtech, but I'd think building a sports book would be fairly interesting & not evil. Things I think are a shade past where I want to be: high risk consumer credit, for profit prisons, private military contractors & pyramid marketing schemes.

I wouldn't work on high-risk consumer credit either (I assume there aren't many coding jobs in the prison industry). My problem with casinos is the same as your issue with high risk consumer credit. You're right: there may be exceptions.

I suppose I could be persuaded to work in high risk consumer credit if the point was to eliminate the exploitation and I suppose doing that in casinos means getting rid of them.

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#57

Post by patio11 »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #50
wballard wrote: post #33

Control software for the baby oil and baby powder plant.

This seems oddly specific. Why?

There was a famous incident in the Gulf War where the US bombed a facility which was described by the US as a chemical weapons factory and by Iraq as a factory which produced powdered milk for infants. This is likely a callback (via snowclone) to that incident.

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#59

Post by wglb »

Not to be too light about this serious topic but anything in COBOL. But that is what I said before I had to program in RPG III for about a year then discovered COBOL was not so bad. But then what are you going to do on an IBM system 34.

Also I will never again write a furniture store inventory and accounts receivable program in Altair Basic.

Incidentally not many of you know that Altair Basic was written using a BSO 8085 emulator running on a PDP 10 somewhere near Harvard. Possibly unlicensed.

Which is a cool idea--if you can't lay your hands on the target hardware, write an emulator for it while you wait. I actually did that for a totally obscure bit of hardware while writing a compiler back end for it. I think it was a flight simulator system.

Admittedly these are more personal than ethical. But isn't there sort of a connection between ethics and a sense of proper design?

[edit typo]

Re: What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

#60

Post by hawkice »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #36

I moved out of ad tech, around the time my boss asked me to do something I thought was unethical. I don't know that I'm out of it forever -- I find few industries a hard "no". Rather, it has to do with the people I'm working with and the exact project. I try not to make things that are addictive or harm the psyche, or that perpetuate social ills. I try not to do things that can be repurposed for those things. Some in…

I've had the exact same experience with adtech. People in this thread may, like we did, underestimate how immoral many of the people in this space are.
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