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by robocat 356 days ago
> bad guys

You imply there are some good guys.

What company?

6 comments

There are plenty of companies that don't immediately qualify as "the bad guys".

For instance, of all companies I've interviewed with or have friends working at that developed tech, some companies build and sell furnitures. Some are your electricity provider or transporter. Some are building inventory management systems for hospitals and drug stores. Some develop a content management system for medical dictionnary. The list is long.

The overwhelming majority of companies are pretty harmless and ethically mundane. They may still get involved in bad practice, but that's not inherent to their business. The hot tech companies may be paying more (blood money if you ask me), but you have other options.

Depends. Does your definition of “good” mean “perfect”? If so, cynical remarks like “no one is good” would be totally correct.
Signal, Proton, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Mastodon, Deepseek.
There are some less bad.

But, can't think of one off hand. Maybe Toys-R-Us? Ooops gone. Radio Shack? Ooops, also gone.

On the scale of Bad/Profit, Nice dies out.

Google circa 2005?

Twitter circa 2012?

In 2025? Nobody, I don't think. Even Mozilla is turning into the bad guys these days.

Signal, Mastodon
Bluesky, Kagi
In my head at least, Bluesky are way closer to "the bad guys'. I don't trust them at all, pretty sure that in spite of what they say, they're going to do the same sort of rug pull that Google did with their "do no evil" assurances.
Funnily enough, I would actually flip it to say this about Kagi. With Bluesky, everything they have built is available to continue to be useful for people completely independent of what the folks over at Bluesky decide to do. There is no vendor lock in at all.

Kagi, on the other hand, has released none of their technology publicly, meaning they have full power to boil the frog, with no actual assurance that their technology will be useful regardless of their future actions.

Google was bad the moment it chose its business model. See The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for details. Admittedly there was a nice period after it chose its model when it seemed good because it was building useful tools and hadn't yet accrued sufficient power / market share for its badness to manifest overtly as harm in the world.
DeepSeek et al.

Obv

You are searching in the wrong place if you look for "good guys" among commercial companies.