If you’re a criminal I will not use any application you write

While I appreciate the author's argument against being stalked, or giving information to criminals, they ignore the core culprit: information-as-a-service. Most importantly, the author presents a "No True Scotsman" argument around who should develop software and why. 'Mark' and his 'stalking' system may have optimized it, but he sure didn't invent it. The author conveniently forgets to mention that information is a two-way steet. Trust is a hard problem.

> Every reasonable person would act against stalkers like Mark and his cronies. Let’s apply this logic to the digital realm.

The author assumes that a digital persona matches their physical persona. This is not the case. Plenty of people curate content that does not match their personal beliefs, purely for economic benefit. Are they criminals?

>If you’re a criminal, I will not use any application you write.

Author probably has not considered that these writings may result in a defamation case against them, if someone views them as a valuable prospect. If the ruling works against them, does that make them a criminal immediately unworthy of their engineering contribution? If so, a number of reverse engineers who skirt these laws every day would like to have a word with the author.

Is this supposed to be satire ???

I think I agree with the author's sentiment and final conclusions, but I very much disagree with some of the language used.

The author never defines "criminal". I can only hope they don't literally mean "someone who breaks a law". From jaywalking in Singapore to being gay in Iran, plenty of people meet that criteria, for reasons that don't necessarily mean any software they produce cannot (or should not) be trusted.

Whether or not you are a criminal is often political. To write off "criminals" in this way without even acknowledging any of this seems very counterproductive to the larger fight for rights the author is clamoring for. I am sure a simple "in the context of this article, I mean [this and that] when I use the term criminal" would be enough to clarify.

> Would you deem Mark an upstanding citizen or report his insidious behavior? His actions mirror a stalker’s obsession, yet he commands a virtual kingdom. Now, transpose this image onto the face of Big Tech, those companies that liken themselves to friendly community builders. Is it any less sinister?

It may not be any less sinister, but there is a qualitative difference between having a single person stalk you, and having an apparatus in place that automatically reacts to what it observes of your behavior. Stalkers often set up such apparatus, and that should be/remain illegal in that context. Yet I don't think taking shots at Sentry or haphazardly reducing them to privacy violations is useful. Nor is is useful to treat a system (largely digital) the same way you would treat a person.

> So why does the situation change when you’re talking about billion-dollar conglomerates in the tech industry? Why do we laugh it off or shrug when it’s technology that’s tracking us?

Technology on its own doesn't want anything, whereas stalkers do. Again, I suspect the author's intent here is to highlight that there is someone on the "other end" of this tech that is actually viewing and using the tracking data.

I just can't understand what this is being written for, in the end, unless it's mostly for the emotional release or catharsis. If it is the latter, then I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong here. If this is intended to reach an audience and maybe push for change, however, it fails pretty flatly to me. It's a call-out of the unconvinced that ends up preaching to the choir more than anything else. As I would consider myself part of that choir, I don't find it that upsetting to read. At the same time, I don't get much from reading it, either.

I felt the analogy with the hooded guy in a corner actually quite fitting and not hysterical. Note that there is a long history of using the term hysterical to refer to various non-compliers to enforced badnenss, eg. women demanding a vote.

I think I need to rethink the way I wrote this article, because the wrong message is being understood. Clearly I have done a bad job at writing it. I should rewrite this article entirely. Thank you for the feedback