231–240 of 286 posts
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Probably best indexed to profit rather than revenue. 10% of revenue would be a one quarter’s profit for meta, but more than a year’s profit for Amazon and about 9 years of profit for Otto. Higher margins / profits should mean higher fines.
Profit doesn't include employee and especially executive compensation, i.e. what the perpetrators were paid.
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Probably best indexed to profit rather than revenue. 10% of revenue would be a one quarter’s profit for meta, but more than a year’s profit for Amazon and about 9 years of profit for Otto. Higher margins / profits should mean higher fines.
The laws specify revenue, to avoid transfer pricing removing all fineable profits. Live by the sword, die by the sword I guess.
As relevant as ever.
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Definitely a good way to drive talent overseas. Get the low level people to assume all of the risk with none of the upsides; ask recent grades and junior people to do E2E ethical analysis on every project in addition to their 60 hour/week job, give the truly evil people convenient, lower-level scapegoats.
You don't need to invest significant time to realize that working around privacy restrictions is wrong and you shouldn't do it.
Nobody sits down with a mid-level developer and says “we need your native app to receive webrtc connections that will be used to send app-layer telemetry that circumvents privacy protections”. The requirement is just to receive events and log them. And odds are there were all sorts of harmless events as well.
At the level where people had a holistic view of the system and intent, sure, throw them in jail. I’d guess that’s about 1% of the people who designed, implemented, tested, documented this code.
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Comparing engineers writing tracking code for ads, to hitmen killing people, is an extremely dishonest and emotionally manipulative comparison. These things aren't even in the same category, and you know it.
You're right, hitmen only affect a relatively small number of people while software developers can easily worsen the lives of thousands if not millions.
This system was designed and implemented by engineers who committed code in a source control system with their name attached, and the changes were requested by product managers in tickets in the ticketing system with their name attached. Those engineers and product managers should be personally liable for an equivalent % of their annual salary as Facebook is liable for a % of its annual revenue.
However, there is a conversation to be had about engineers writing code that they fully know is illegal. Imo there should be a punishment for staying complicit and not reporting it to the authorities. Like that time Volkswagen components detected when they were under test and performed differently.
I'm not going full "it's your own fault for having those apps installed" — it really isn't — but people need to learn they shouldn't trust apps made by these giant adzillas. (Which to be fair you could also argue for Android as a whole, and Chrome).
If Facebook and Instagram are "dominating the market" as the EU likes to say, maybe it's time to force allowing 3rd party frontend apps?
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I'm not asking about browsers, I'm asking about a search engine. How could a search engine block a tracking pixel? You click a link in the search engine and go to a website. The search engine can't control the website after you go there, can it?
DuckDuckGo and Brave have browsers on Android
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No, what you are suggesting is a typical strategy of avoiding punishment and creating an opportunity to break the law. A very common strategy, used everywhere, especially in dictatorial and socialist regimes. There is a substitution of one real crime, committed by real people, for a crime "they didn’t know, but should have" against other people, for which there is no real responsibility, while the real criminals are…
So your argument is that because the ring leaders, and the people who benefit the most from the crimes, almost always get off - we should forget about them and just penalize the people who have to do what they are told because they need to feed their families? That would seem to be a recipe for more crime, not less. Note i don't think anyone is saying those directly involved should get off scot-free, just that those…
The obligation to commit crimes in such systems arises precisely from the ability of the ring leader to take responsibility from the criminal onto himself to a significantly lesser extent, citing the fact that he did not commit the crime, but simply did not take something into account or did not know something.
> Note i don't think anyone is saying those directly involved should get off scot-free
But this is exactly what the existence of such a system leads to: the directly involved criminals escape responsibility, or their punishment is significantly reduced because most of the responsibility falls on the system and no one in particular bears full responsibility.
And if the performer bears full responsibility, there will be much fewer crimes, because in this case the performer will already know that he will bear full responsibility, that other employees, fearing full responsibility, will not cover for him, that his boss, who puts him in conditions requiring the commission of a crime, will not be able to relieve him of this responsibility by spreading it on himself or shifting it upwards with blurring. In such a system, the main beneficiary will no longer be able to demand that workers commit crimes - because no one wants to risk to become the scapegoat with no additional profits.
What's funny is that the engineers who implemented this are probably one of us here on HN. I don't think Zuck implemented this himself
This is why I earn half as much working in science now. We will never reach unicorn status but we also won’t treat our end users and partners like pawns to exploit on our path to wealth and power. I can live with that.