Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 282 posts

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#121

Post by cherryteastain »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #4

Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around. I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.). Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applica…

> shameful to work for

As bad as Meta products are for society, I'd say Palantir is far more shameful to work for.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#122

Post by hbcdbff »

cherryteastain wrote: post #121
jazzpush2 wrote: post #4

Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around. I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.). Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applica…

> shameful to work for As bad as Meta products are for society, I'd say Palantir is far more shameful to work for.

I disagree. Many Palantir FDEs work on morally benign or even positive projects, for example helping hospitals during COVID. (Of course, many also do unethical work).

At Meta, almost everyone is contributing to unethical ends.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#123

Post by otterley »

inigyou wrote: post #120
otterley wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without evidence of this “special arrangement” I don’t see why anyone should believe you. You made a claim that is directly contrary to WhatsApp’s published materials and they have a lot to lose if you are correct. On the other hand, if your accusation is false, it’s tantamount to libel.

How's this? Not sure if it's the same issue but it's much more damning than the one I knew about. https://www.techspot.com/news/112232-federal-agent-whatsapp-... You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.

[dead]

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#124

Post by breppp »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #106
mdavid626 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crying in Germany with 60-85k average SW engineer salary.

Yeah, but you don’t have to have to pay SF mortgage prices, have a working public healthcare, no hordes of homeless on your doorstep etc. etc. One might argue that we get more for our sille euro wages. Also if we decide to leave the company, we are not completely f_ckd, since our families don ’t suddenly drop out of healthcare and other services.

There are countries with universal healthcare and SV comparable wages

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#125

Post by arkh »

lend000 wrote: post #52
test6554 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day... 2004-2005 facebook was amazing. Spread like wildfire, and lots of fun to use. Just you and your college friends, and their friends.

Even the original idea (if The Social Network is a trustworthy source) was copied -- Zuckerberg just has a complete lack of vision, but is clearly an intelligent operator with good business sense. Jagged intelligence, like an LLM.

In 2001 France had Copains d'avant https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copains_d%27avant for school based networking. So not a new idea

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#126

Post by steve1977 »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #4

Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around. I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.). Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applica…

I guess having an insecure creep as CEO could play a role in all that.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#127

Post by TZubiri »

Lio wrote: post #103
otterley wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that police should have their activities monitored at work? How about child care workers? Nuclear power plant operators? Bank tellers? And if those are ok, what makes them different?

They’re different because of the job they do, who’s doing the monitoring and who has access to the records. In all the examples you’ve given the monitoring is used to reduce the power imbalance between the public and vested interests with their own agenda. For example, so the bank teller doesn’t steal from account holders. For child care workers it’s to protect children in care. If it was used solely to gather inform…

But the job that facebook employees might be surveilling people. Shouldn't they be surveilled so that they don't surveil ilegitimately?

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#128

Post by kortilla »

dozerly wrote: post #30
ra0x3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe a little preachy, but the gist of the point isn't incorrect

In a large portion of tech people like to pretend that they are absolved of responsibility for their societal contributions. “Get that bag” and all that. Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc. It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response

> Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.

You don’t work at Anduril to make bread, at least not as a software engineer. It’s a long hours startup with worse pay than FAANG in high CoL areas. The people that work there fundamentally believe in “improving the defense of the west”.

It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military. If you want to bag on people in the military, go ahead. But they are not in the same category as people just doing things for convenient good money.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#129

Post by kortilla »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #90
least wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t particularly care for platitudes from anonymous people on the internet. Even less so when they reduce a complex dilemma in your life to a binary choice between an “easy and amoral” option and a “difficult but righteous” one. Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize,…

I agree. That said, a cursory glance at their post history shows they donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'. In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily. We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at…

> donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.

Have you considered that the harm of the loss of 6 figures can completely destroy local charities?

This quickly devolves into effective altruism and the problems that come with that but it’s very easy to end up in a situation where you think the net good you bring by keeping a local abused women shelter open far outweighs the negative consequences for working at Meta.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#130

Post by 59nadir »

haunter wrote: post #78
jazzpush2 wrote: post #4

Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around. I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.). Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applica…

> I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place zstd I’m torn about React and PyTorch :)

Corporate open-source (Open Source) is done for free labor and PR, it shouldn't be bonus points for any company that does it, unless they commit to it and pay their contributors, have no CLAs that allow them to relicense the work, or adopt practices and licenses that are clearly more in line with the actual spirit of free software. Real free software that should be considered a public good is produced by people, for people.

There are sometimes well meaning people in corporations that do their best to at least get something out there and kudos to them, but corporations running Open Source projects should receive no goodwill for it, it's basically a scam.

Post reply on HN