Think less of them.
Edit: Also, that's not what "explicitly" means. I think you meant "implicitly".
people quit google over the military project because they didn’t agree with it. i don’t think it’s crazy to do the same over facebooks disgusting manipulation of their user base.
There's a lot of FB employees on HN and I wager a lot of them know how scummy their employer is. Yes, many are staying for the paycheck (and because leaving a job isn't an easy thing for everyone), but I know several who are staying because they feel that their position is where they can produce the most good for the world.
Similarly, I know many people in politics who despise who/what they work for, but keep at it because that is where they can make a difference.
It doesn't always work. But it also doesn't make me think less of them. At least of the ones who aren't staying because of the $.
For the users, Facebook is just a means of communication, among many others. If it disappeared tomorrow 10 different platforms would replace it and the level of goodness in the world might even increase.
Doing good is probably the lamest, least truthful excuse for working at Facebook, goes to show how self-deluded people can be.
Do you think Facebook is a net positive for the world? Borderline, or overwhelmingly?
To be clear, I'm not asking whether some people get net benefit out of it, I'm talking about the net overall effect on society and the individuals within it.
Personally, I believe it is causing tremendous psychological damage, and that anyone that works there is a contributor to that end.
Sticking to the "net positive / net negative" terms, imagine Facebook contributes a number of positive / negative points to the world. Now the sum can be a net negative, but that doesn't mean some line items aren't positives.
Where do you work? Is your company flawless? Are you a contributor to every single one of its misdeeds merely because you work there? This isn't an easy thing to answer for everyone. I think it's certainly a question more Facebook employees should ask themselves though.
It is far from the most extreme of social changes that have occurred in history to suggest people stop using a particular company's tools.
The Nuremberg defence is widely regarded as invalid.
No, working at Facebook is the modern day corporate equivalent of the banality of evil.
Unless you genuinely think Facebook is doing good, take some fucking responsibility and rethink _your_ view on life.
* The projects directly help their business operations; those engineers might be doing the same work, anyway, even if Facebook were zealously closed source.
* Open source work gives the company image a boost in the minds of potential employees. This expands the labor pool, reducing the wages FB needs to pay, and helps give FB access to talent it otherwise simply could not have. In this case, hiring engineers to work on open source projects is little more than a PR campaign targeted at people like you and me--and it's clearly working on you.
The "good deeds" of their open source work are entirely accidental; the whole point of employing engineers to work on open source libraries is to help their business, which is inherently exploitative.
I agree with lancewiggs: by working at Facebook, your friends are aiding and abetting one of the most unethical and socially-dangerous companies in modern times. Think less of them.
> Think less of them.
Given their explicit support of scummy actions and not humanity, do you feel Facebook employees should be punched, in the defence of humanity?
That's a horrible metric to apply measuring 'human worth', whatever that is. Humans are by default wired to do what everyone else is doing. Just using Facebook because everyone else is doing it as well is what humans do. They flock to the communities and forums where the action is. They cannot comprehend graph theory intuitively and what power Facebook potentially wields in interfering in their lives.
Governments are supposed to protect people from threats the masses cannot comprehend. Like example taking care of vaccinations.
Privacy for him and his family, that is.
The entry point was an email claiming you have to "read and accept the updated policies in order to continue using the site". And the first thing you're presented with was that two-choice "Manage data settings" / "Accept and continue", implying for the user who is less than extremely careful that if you don't "Accept and continue", you won't be able to use the site anymore.
It's only after that modal that you're presented with the updated T&Cs which you indeed need to either accept or delete your account.
And of course all the various things people have noted:
- A red dot in the fake-header to make you think you have pending notifications
- A complete disregard for "privacy by default"
All this right after Mark testified in congress saying "no we used to be bad and we made mistakes but now we really care, you see".
For a site that despises transparency, Facebook has never been so transparent about how little it gives a crap about its users.
I have some friends working at Facebook who will probably read this and be upset I think so little of their place of work. Folks, I have a huge respect for some of the excellent work that goes on at Facebook, especially in open source. But that doesn't change how scummy the core site itself is.