Xiaomi sent user data to China without consent. [1]
Palantir proposed an illegal campaign agaisnt Wikileaks [2] and its very industry is by its nature fairly dubious and shady, though that doesn't mean it's doing things that are strictly illegal aside from what is known.
Snapchat ignored and didn't fix various privacy and security issues. [3]
Pintrest operates in a dubious copyright gray area. [4]
Spotify pays artists very little and most money gets sent to record labels. Even labels see almost nothing. [5]
Like Uber, Lyft engages in unethical treatment of its workers. [6]
I can go on. The badness of these things varies significantly. Not all of them indicate a company is totally unethical. But I think the assertion "most Silicon Valley companies are doing at least some illegal, scammy, or otherwise unethical things in order to get ahead" is completely true.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/xiaomi-under-investigation-for-...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/style/uber-facebook-and-ot...
[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-illegal-faq-2012-2?...
[5] http://www.hearya.com/2012/11/28/david-macias-enlightening-l...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Lyft/comments/2y16r3/lyfts_highly_u... (aggregates news articles)
How is that shady? They have deals with the appropriate companies.
Buzzfeed spams the crap out of Facebook. Eventbrite & Vice had some spamming issues in the beginning as well. I'm not sure about Snapchat's growth story - they may have been a rare example of natural growth, along with Google. Most of the rest of those you're talking about aren't really the kinds of pure internet plays that are relevant to this discussion. No amount of spamming would have made Xiaomi, Palantir, SpaceX, DJI, etc any more successful, so they didn't employ these techniques.
AirBNB's CAN-SPAM violating email was clearly unethical. A media company showing up on Facebook more than you would prefer is, at worst, mildly annoying. There's an important difference.
Ethical people do not need to leave Silicon Valley. Dishonesty is not prerequisite to success. Your claims are wrong.
Again, you're implying things that I simply didn't say.
>A media company showing up on Facebook more than you would prefer is, at worst, mildly annoying
You're right, that's not spam, but that's not what I was referring to either. I'm not going to write a massive explanation here of the specific Facebook spamming techniques employed by Buzzfeed et al, but suffice it to say that they are actively and aggressively spamming to "prime the viral pump" with certain stories.
This is a stretch.
However, I decided it was ethical for the context of this conversation, because to my knowledge they don't lie to grow revenue. They claim they'll charge a huge pile of money to analyze data, and that's precisely what they do.
Almost every company is mendacious and shady.
Good God!!!
This simply isn't true. There are a few who did that, but they're the exception, not the rule.
Shady unicorns: Uber (too many to count), AirBNB (spam), DropBox (lied about encryption/security), The Honest Co (lied about product quality)
Not Shady unicorns: Xiaomi, Palantir, Snapchat, SpaceX, Pinterest, Spotify, DJI, Intarcia, Stripe, Vice, CreditKarma, CloudFlare, BloomEnergy, Fanatics, Slack, Blue Apron, GitHub, Domo, SurveyMonkey, BlaBlaCar, Lyft, MongoDB, Buzzfeed, Cloudera, Automatic, EventBrite, Evernote, Warby Parker, Docker...
The narrative that "everybody cheats" is just something that cheaters tell themselves, so they can pretend that their behavior was warranted.
That said, it's worth discussing these things before applying to a company, because dishonesty creates massive risk in the company, so if you hear and answer that sounds like 'downandout's, you need to devalue that company, because their lack of ethics creates risk for that particular company, and it creates reputational risk for you.