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Instead they covered LA Live and surrounding area with them and then just sold that data to… well I’m not sure who since I left shortly after they did that.
The justification was “but we put it in the TOS and Privacy Policy”.
Think about dual-use. You may never really know quite how your creations pan out. Not quite in the league of Mikhail Kalashnikov, but it piqued my now intense interest in tech ethics.
EDIT: damnit seems like everybody here is in the same boat. So mine was a gesture detection for medical robotics control that was repurposed for look-and-lock air combat (fire and forget a2a missile. An important caveat is I'm not even a "pacifist" and went in eye's wide open with a defence firm. I just wish they'd told me more up front that this was "generic tech" I was developing.
The Qatar slave helmet. My company built the smart helmet used to track Qatar’s army of abused workers. The claim is GPS and accelerometer where used to track if a worker stopped moving or fell due to an accident; the geo fencing was supposedly for tracking if they had enough workers in an area for the job. The reality is the helmets where/are used as mass surveillance tech to ensure workers are continuously active a…
What is the official name of that product?
[1] https://qstp.org.qa/arab-techpreneur-sets-sights-transformin...
The Qatar slave helmet. My company built the smart helmet used to track Qatar’s army of abused workers. The claim is GPS and accelerometer where used to track if a worker stopped moving or fell due to an accident; the geo fencing was supposedly for tracking if they had enough workers in an area for the job. The reality is the helmets where/are used as mass surveillance tech to ensure workers are continuously active a…
I have wasted a lot of time building a two sided marketplace for gigs, that was the biggest thing i regret, that i kept trying for much too long of a time
Then I started reading customer support emails, took a few phone calls from disgruntled customers, and it turns out the company was just cycling cash. Would charge 100 orders and float the cash as it trickled out refunds.
I ended up leaving, and the company sold for a couple million a year later. I was left with a bad taste for e-commerce that has only recently went away.
I built a crypto invoice system that was originally targeted towards our freelance dev clients, which was soon overrun with drug sellers, weapons sellers, and when it reached a point where some of the invoice descriptions included words like "8yo.mp4" we realized it was time to put it down. We reported the IPs of the people involved and shut down the servers. Luckily I live in a third world country and not somewhere…
Those people found another way to get paid.
Although I couldn't ever blame you for shutting it down. I'd probably do the same and try to forget about it for many years.
The whole product was positioned for process optimisation but I know for a fact that it was used to monitor and eventually reduce headcount at multiple customers. I still feel gross just thinking about it but the company is supposedly making good money off of it given that they just announced a new version.