You should never “trust” anyone who you do business with outside of a contract.
In this specific case Mark Zuckerberg holds controlling amount of the stock.
I’ve had a manager before who supported everything I was doing but when he was let go, I was left hanging in the wind. I’ve slso had a manager who wouldn’t listen to me (I was the Dev lead), everything failed in just the way I warned it would and I could see he was going to blame me.
Never trust a company - and by extension your manager who represents the company to his reports.
That’s about like the people who trust HR.
https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warr...
"Warren attributes those problems to a shift, which she says dates back to the 1980s, in the obligations of corporations — from balancing responsibilities to all their stakeholders — including both employees and stock owners — to prioritizing their financial return to shareholders only."
(That's not exactly responsive to your point on maximizing profit, but the body of work on this topic shows that when companies care about long-term return, and about employees and other stakeholders, they aren't solely focused on maximizing short-term profit over all else.)
Starting in 1970, Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a corporation was to increase shareholder value, and all of its other activities - providing jobs, fighting pollution, enhancing social justice, even serving customers - were subservient to that, to be engaged in only if they also helped profits. It took a while for this view to catch on, but following Reagan's election, it gained a lot of popularity in political & legal circles, and was firmly entrenched among business leaders by the mid-80s.
The problem is that we've since discovered a number of ways that corporations can enhance shareholder value (as measured by stock price) without actually benefitting customers, and most of them involve strip-mining value built up over the long term at the expense of the future. And so a significant fraction of the population is just engaged in financial games while they get busy firing everyone who does actual work.
I think of this as the conversion of social capital into financial. The monetisation of things that used to be personal relationships, such as becoming intermediaries what used to be direct interaction.
For example, Facebook could've over-induldged on overlay full-screen ads or "watch this video for 30 seconds before proceeding" ads, but they chose not to.
Any public company that is not majority owned by one person and is not maximizing their profit is a target of a Carl Icahn type of investor, who will buy up enough shares to force them to maximize profits.
Your identity is no longer tied to the company and the only thing left is how much profit per share.
It's sort of like a microchasm of socialism or communism. If you own 9% of apple, people don't blame you personally when apple misbehaves.
Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.
> There is such a thing as business ethics.
> Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.
It's alarming how businesses' lack of business ethics is getting normalized by comments like the grandparent's. We should require that companies be ethical and condemn them when they aren't. Yes, we'll often be disappointed, just like we're disappointed with the fraction of humanity that becomes criminal, but that doesn't mean we should lower our standards.
Yes, we should require them. The WhatsApp founder didn't attempt that, he just hoped they wouldn't.
I suspect that a large class of these "business ethics" violations are actually torts, but the problem with enforcing them is that to do so you a.) need to know what your rights are b.) need to detect violations of them and c.) need to bring a lawsuit against the offender. I remember that on Google's invention disclosure form, one of the questions was "How easy would it be to detect if a competitor was using this invention in their product?", and if the answer was "We'd never know", we wouldn't patent the idea and would keep it as a trade secret instead, on the assumption that if a competitor could use the invention illegally without us knowing about it, they would, and so it was better to deny them knowledge of the invention entirely than to publish and try to enforce unenforceable rights.
When the aggrieved party is a consumer or worker, it's triply difficult, as most consumers a.) aren't aware of their rights b.) have no information about what's going on inside big corporations and c.) don't have money to sue even if they know. Many of the ethical problems in U.S. business today stem from the legal system not being able to scale up to 300M often poorly-informed citizens.
In this case, Acton's not the aggrieved party. The consumer is - they could argue that Facebook's introduction of advertising and linking of user data harmed them in a way they had not agreed to when they signed up for Whatsapp, or that its purchase violated antitrust law and reduced consumer choice. But good luck enforcing that, at least in the US, where privacy protections are weak and antitrust regulators are asleep. It looks like the EU regulators actually did enforce it, and slapped FB with a $122M fine, but that's peanuts for them.
I expect/require that people not steal from me even though I don't have a contract or prior agreement with them, and I also predict that some people won't respect my property.
How does this apply to the founders though. They sold, so isn't WhatsApp now not their property?
You mean, except for criminal law? I don't see how this is in any way equivalent to adding ads to Whatsapp.
It's not against the law to lie to me in most cases, but I still have the same expectation/requirement that people will be honest with me that I do that they won't steal.
I wouldn't trust a handshake agreement on a used car.
If you feel strongly about it go further and organize more people to do the same. Try to convince people who don't feel the company is unethical that it is.
But in the end you can't expect because you don't like a company that your feelings on what should happen to come to be.
It's like so many people complaining on Twitter about Twitter not banning voices they don't like. If you don't like Twitter's policies then stop using their product. If enough people agree with you and do this they will change. If you feel it's worth spending your life organizing people to boycott Twitter then spend your life doing that. But the culture of demanding that platforms must adhere to someones arbitrary expectations as if using their platform is a right is ridiculous.
I don't know very much about Lyft but I have yet to hear anything bad about them which is pretty encouraging.
One of the Uber criticisms is that they don't respect local laws when they do such expansions, so maybe that is part of why Lyft might be more cautious. Still, non-US markets and global user bases are much more of a thing as time goes on, so it feels like they're very severely missing out.
Even if your manager is ethical and “cares” about the well being of his employees, his manager may not. Even if his manager does the board, the investors/shareholders, etc. probably don’t. The whole purpose of a corporation is that a corporation survives without regards of any one person getting hit by a bus.
I worked for a struggling company a few years ago and management was very honest about the dire straights we were in, I was part of the team who sat in on interviews and did presentations for potential acquirers so I knew what was going on.
I trusted management not to purposefully screw me over. But at the end of the day, if they “guaranteed me” that my check would clear for every hour I worked I wouldn’t have believed them. The only reason I stayed until the bitter end was because our VC backers promised us in writing that we would be payed until we got an official layoff notice.
This is defeatist. Corporations can be sued in courts, just like people. Their obligations are binding, just like peoples'. There is a little more complexity to signing a deal with a corporation than a natural person because there are multiple sapient interests involved, but that's what lawyers are for.
Protecting users' privacy was never prioritized in the acquisition process. If it had been, the anti-monetization clause would have been stronger.
That's okay. We're talking about billions of dollars. But turning around and playing the good guy will take these men more than simply claiming ignorance.
I never said that companies go around breaking legally binding contracts or there is no recourse if they do. I said you shouldn’t trust a handshake deal when doing any business that amounts to real money. Get it in writing.
TL;DR version of which is "Make as much money as possible or become irrelevant note in history"
Edit: Oh, please. Downvotes keep demonstrating a total disconnect between HN responses that require pushing a downvote button and say mass resignation from Google or Facebook or Whatsapp or Well Fargo or Equifax that might trigger a response.
So yes, the only business ethics that is relevant in the real world is "Make as much money as possible".
They're not noteworthy because they're the norm, not the exception.
These are the same businesses that everyone at HN laughs at as they only pay $40k/year for senior software engineers.
They sold the company. By selling the company they have become employees, not founders with control. If they did not like it, they should not have sold. If they are remorseful, they can donate 100% of all the money that they made from a sale of the company as well as all the interest that they have accumulated to some me-so-sorry non-profit. Not 10%. Not 50%. 100%. Otherwise those are just empty words, just like protests of HN crowd working for Google, Facebook, Equifax, etc.: empty words that make them feel better.