[gjm11]

> People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone.

Of course they get harmed: their time is wasted, and perhaps their concentration disturbed. This is a small harm to each victim, no doubt about it, but if you write code that makes your social-messaging application spam people then you're delivering that small harm to a large number of people. If your code wastes 10 seconds each, just once, for a million people, that's about three person-months of aggregate time you've stolen that will never come back.

It's quite true that "in social networking, your personal data what the company uses to make a profit". But if it were near-universal practice for new software engineers to swear a solemn oath not to use their powers for evil, who knows? perhaps some other business model for social networking might have had a chance to succeed.

[disgruntledphd2]

Its also true that in search, your personal data is what the company uses to make a profit. And yet, one hears less complaints about that.

I'm not justifying either approach, by the way, just observing what I regard as a strange disconnect.