what harm to society? from where i’m standing they’re a huge net positive, they’ve enabled huge advances in society, they’ve enabled great collaboration across the whole planet and enabled us all to benefit from the one of the greatest inventions of humankind: the internet.

could they do better? sure. are they past their peak? maybe. but their past contributions are immense.

Ads help SMBs and larger ones so much. Sure there’s issues here and there but meta has probably pushed GDP forward pretty hard and enabled awesome amounts of product discovery, and this is just on the ads side. Think of everything people have learned on FB/IG. I’ve met so many valuable people.

I think Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Palantir, Comcast, Juul, Uber, any defense contractor, Nestle, Philip Morris, etc are at least arguably less ethical work than even Meta, and get less flak just by being behind slightly less visible to users.

While there's many legitimate serious criticisms of both Meta and Google, I think many of the concerns are misdirected or overexaggerated. The omnibox thing mentioned in the comic is a pretty concrete example to me of a false criticism: the Chrome feature is that it fetches query suggestions for what you've typed so far, which means it's going to be sending what you've typed to a server. Firefox also does exactly same thing and continuously sends what you are typing to Google or Bing to fetch query suggestions, and I don't see people writing this same comic about how Firefox is somehow evil to implement such a feature.

On android, try turning off search suggestions, it is a literal maze as depicted:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en&co=...

In firefox android it is a simple toggle button under settings->search.

I believe the linked documentation is account wide including going to google.com in Microsoft Edge and then typing into the search box on the website. It's not surprising to me that turning off behavior on across your account in any context can't be done in browser settings.

Sure, but it’s not just querying based on what you type in. It takes what you typed, adds it to the model of you built from your past searches and web history and tailors the results to match a mixture of

A) what it thinks today-you wants based on yesterday-you

B) what someone else is willing to pay to inset above the results of a)

It’s way less benign than you make out.

They also aggregate all the similar searches and correlate that over geography and demographics, and probably sell that. They can predict infection progress through a population from search terms.

Admittedly, that’s useful… but it also feels “underhand” in a way that simpler “product->fee->customer” relationships used to work.

I think most users genuinely do prefer to get personalized suggestions instead of irrelevant ones. Firefox is still doing this by default implies pretty strongly to me that the feature is a meaningful benefit to the product, and isn't just in Chrome as a covert data collection mechanism.

I don't believe that (b) is true for Google (paid placement in autocomplete). Google, for all it's flaws, does consistently mark Ads as Ads. I'm pretty sure smaller companies like Yelp and Uber are much more likely to be doing some "secretly paid placement" than Google (but I'd still presume any one of them is not).

You're probably right. I also muddled "search results" and "autocomplete suggestions".

Believer or not, there's a lot of wisdom in the Bible.

Including John 8:7

Also, i find it interesting to note how tech salaries have climbed in the past two decades, precisely as IT was more and more employed as a means of ruining peoples' lives (micro-management based on metrics, surveillance industry, IoT and other scams, centralized monopolies like Amazon, etc).

The price of keeping IT people complicit/quiet in the scheme has risen, but we as a privileged class of IT people should understand that we're precisely being paid for silence about the atrocities we help build. We are collaborators to an oppressive system, and if that's something that bothers you maybe you should consider alternatives.

Edit: your/you’re

> Perhaps by working there, people believe they can be that change?

We're talking about highly intelligent people, at least some of them understand that the code they maintain sometimes performs actions that are illegal. They could lift their fingers from the keyboard when they recognize that something is not right. They could choose to not be complicit.

The rationalisations and denials point strongly to the answer being: Because we're bad people.

I was hoping for better, but live and be disappointed, I guess.

There are far worse companies for the world than Google -- in the grand scheme of "harm done to humanity", Google pales in comparison to Exxon or BP or Phillip Morris or Lockheed-Martin or Dupont etc.

Facebook/Meta, that's potentially a separate discussion.

In any case if you feel like companies like Google are causing serious harm to the world then you need to have a deeper conversation about capitalism generally [which I encourage you to do]. Is it possible that the whole model of profit incentives as we have them now inevitably creates the things you're complaining about? Why attack engineers personally when in the end it's just "rational actors" acting like mice following the cheese?

PS totally aside from what harm Google might be doing to the world (again mild compared to the above named corporations), we probably should talk about what harm Google is doing to our industry.

Not everyone shares your viewpoint and values. If you think everyone thinks Google and Meta, or even the idea of personalization as being harmful to society, you have found yourself in a bubble.