A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

I think that a better look at this subject is a recent piece in The Atlantic titled, "Are Facebook, Twitter, and Google American Companies?"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/are-f...

tl;dr, this back-and-forth is unsettling to a Federalist:

>In response to a tough line of questions from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, gave two conflicting answers within a couple of minutes. Cotton pressed Edgett on Twitter’s decision to cut off the CIA’s access to alerts derived from the Twitter-data fire hose, which is provided through a company it partially owns, Dataminr, while the companies reportedly still allowed the Russian media outlet RT to continue using the service for some time.

>“Do you see an equivalency between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Russian intelligence services?,” Cotton asked.

>“We’re not offering our service for surveillance to any government,” Edgett responded.

>“So you will apply the same policy to our intelligence community that you’d apply to an adversary’s intelligence services?,” Cotton asked again.

>“As a global company, we have to apply our policies consistently,” Edgett replied. “We’re trying to be unbiased around the world.”

>Cotton then turned to WikiLeaks, which the Intelligence Committee has designated as a nonstate hostile intelligence agency, asking why it had been operating “uninhibited” on Twitter.

>“Is it bias to side with America over our adversaries?,” Cotton demanded.

>“We’re trying to be unbiased around the world,” Edgett said. “We’re obviously an American company and care deeply about the issues we’re talking about today, but as it relates to WikiLeaks or other accounts like it, we make sure they are in compliance with our policies just like every other account.”

I guess it is kind of cyberpunk-y. All we need now is for US Marshals to lay siege to some SF headquarters, facing contracted PMCs denying the validity of their warrants.

This is the second time that I read that WikiLeaks is classified as "hostile intelligence agency". Isn't the purpose of intelligence to gather information to gain advantage over adversaries? It sounds to me like a redundant term like "hostile military". And BTW WikiLeaks leaks are public so all other intelligence agencies and citizens can learn while state agencies try to keep things obscure as much as possible. Who's hostile?

Corporations only worry about ethics if they think it'll affect their reputation or bottom line.

Even then many of them are happy as long as there's public perception that they're acting ethically, even if in reality they're not.

But Kumail's point isn't about whether these companies are patriotic, he's saying they lack any ethical framework of operation and presumes it's because people aren't challenging each other with ethical questions preferring to condone any behavior in favor of flexing engineering muscles and proving that, "yes, they can".

I don't think it's unrelated, and perhaps your point is that it's doubly clear no one has thought about ethics when you examine Sean's contradictory responses. But I think the lack of patriotism is more of an example.

Anyway, at the end of the day we're all people and we are the ones that depend on these companies and services. If you don't believe a company is behaving ethically, stop using their services. Make a damn sacrifice and live your virtue. Sure maybe we could argue that to some extent and in certain cases some companies have crossed the line and are harmfully exploiting customers to the extent that there should be legal ramifications, but the government does not exist to provide you an ethically sterile society. It exist to maintain and protect basic human rights--at least in the US as far as the formal documentation is concerned.

As far as I can gather based on armchair political philosophy over drinks.. most people don't actually care about privacy and rank convenience or safety (at the expense of said privacy) higher in their priorities. I find that unfortunate but at the same time I still haven't worked up the courage to totally disband my Facebook account and switch completely over to my proton mail accounts. So it's complicated.

If we could all agree that privacy is a fundamental human right which you would think would be supported by the constitution in the US then, we should actually act/rally to legislate such as other countries have done. Yet at the same time because these companies operate globally, they serve a diverse spectrum of users who may or may not share the same political and social values as we do in the US. This extends to the very employees who are "failing to ask the ethical questions" that Kumail can so obviously see are overlooked. This is globalization.

TL;DR: they do this because they can, and they can because you let them.

Him and Elon Musk, and many others as well get caught in that aspersion you just cast out there. Way too many for you to haul in.