Tech lead: Can we just leave it on or pre-start it somehow?

Developer: But...

Tech lead: I will think of something.

Tech lead to management: We made camera start 150% faster!

Management: Wow wow wow. It is so great to have such an experienced tech lead we pay so much for.

Tech lead drives into the sunset with his brand new Tesla.

business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".

EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.

For something that has no real legal ramifications, there’s no way you’re stopping it.

The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.

Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to “experiment with engagement” nevermind the literal reality of having such a gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper is.

If I had to bet my own money on what really happened, I'd guess that it's something along these lines:

DEVELOPER: Camera initialization is adding 200ms to app startup

TECH LEAD: Holy crap! We need total startup to be less than 500ms or users start to think things are slow

DEVELOPER: What if we initialize the camera early?

TECH LEAD: Can you do that without recording? It would be very bad if we were recording things.

DEVELOPER: Yes.

TECH LEAD: Do it.

Conspiracy ensues.

Absolutely agree, but it also wouldn't surprise me if they didn't think about it or didn't care.

If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that a surprisingly high number of people / companies / groups managers and/or leaders, do not think about or care about long-term repercussions of the vast majority of their decisions.

2020? I was thinking 1980. To my memory, it seems to have started with the Savings and Loan scandals, and gotten worse.

Companies went from optimizing for 100-year growth to optimizing for the next three months.

There's no reputational damage because the world is already split between people who think FB is the devil and people who don't care.

Not sure why someone is assuming Facebook did this for an honest reason when Facebook is the best example of an extremely dishonest large tech company

*

The founder Zucker berg literally wrote - They trust me, the dumb fucks

He wrote this in college

He has shown a pattern of treating his users as 'dumb fucks'

Again and again more and more data comes up that Facebook is a dishonest company. not a 'by mistake' dishonest, but a fundamentally dishonest company

And always White Knights like this guy show up claiming 'it is to optimize loading speed)

*

Now Facebook is finally getting into trouble with even the left, because instead of helping Obama get elected it seems now they are helping Trump get elected

So their own dishonesty is so extreme that they are trying to help both Democrats and Republicans thinking both sides are dumb fucks that will forget what Facebook did to screw them over in past elections

I don't believe for one second that FB is going to be purposefully taking 'illegal videos' of people.

Nor do I believe Facebook is even evil. It's just a social network, end of story.

No one at Facebook gets to claim they were just following orders if they have _any_ understanding of the possible consequences of their work.

(If you believe the authors/operators that specifically maximize profits over responsibility are not responsible for their outcomes, you should read back into the posting about PG&E in CA: deliberately ignoring the wear & tear on 100 year old support hooks on high-tension power lines, thus sparking the fire that burned down Paradise, CA.)