[wickedsight]

Yeah, I fully agree. This was in the back of my mind while writing the previous comment too. It's also why think it's important to acknowledge it, since that might help people become aware that we're not doing things right.

Only slightly related, but as a lead developer I've had some business people get angry, because I refused to build features that violated customer privacy (and GDPR). It's not just the business that should be responsible, it's IT too, but we tend to use business demands as an excuse (see: Facebook).

[nier]

I’d like to add that job safety and the home that needs money brought to is also used as an excuse. People need to feel safer that they can act upon their morals and overcome whatever consequences arise. Friendships and family ties are one important ingredient for that. Sensible frugality another.

[donkeyd]

Definitely true. I ended up quitting and moving to another job because of unreasonable demands like this. I do imagine though, that in SV, where data is considered the new gold, it must be a lot harder to find jobs at ethical companies.

[Nextgrid]

I’m actually skeptical about data being the new gold. Even if it is true now and we ignore the ethical implications, I don’t think it’ll remain gold in the long term. People have a limited attention span & wallet. There’s only so much advertising they can consume, anything after is worthless. Overall, anyone cashing in on data is diluting the pool for themselves & everyone else until there’s so much that the entire market is no longer sustainable.

The other issue is that there are 2 very strong competitors (Google & Facebook) that I’m not sure it’s wise to start a new company based solely on data/analytics/advertising.

[coldpie]

> Only slightly related, but as a lead developer I've had some business people get angry, because I refused to build features that violated customer privacy (and GDPR).

I wrote a feedback mechanism in an Android application that we made at work. There's a space for users to write their feedback, but of course we collect other information about their system and what they've done in our application. In the feedback dialog, I implemented an expandy thing that shows you all of the data that will be sent, and even has a checkbox next to each line item so the user can choose not to send that data. I showed my boss and he was like, "wow, that's transparent of you" and was blown away by the checkbox feature. Meanwhile I considered it really impolite to do otherwise.

[donkeyd]

That's pretty awesome. And great that your boss thought this was a good idea too.

[coldpie]

Behold the power of making a product for users instead of advertisers.