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A comment on Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex). Parent comment

Re:Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete ... by bigyabai on Sunday June 08, 2025 @10:05PM (#44220885)
The snowflakes don't run the company. If you work somewhere that is designing a really big gun and the CEO uses it to commit an awful crime, you don't share the blame for one person's irresponsibility. It's not a satisfying answer, but it really is up to executives to decide where they draw the line. Nobody else in the business can say 'no'.

Likewise, when we blame IBM for supplying the Nazis during WWII, we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. They aren't the problem; executives without morals are.

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Re:Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete ... by defrost on Sunday June 08, 2025 @10:19PM (#44220944)
> we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers.

Well, you're not. However:

  Black reports that every Nazi concentration camp maintained its own Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollerith Department), assigned with keeping tabs on inmates through use of IBM's punchcard technology.
from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

suggest that a good number of these "early database workers" were working directly with Hollerith codes on human flesh and tasked with the identification of Jews, Roma, and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the regime, along with military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity.

You might argue they are no more responsible for concentration camps than concentration camp guards, but these are the people punching holes in cards and filtering them with knitting needles while looking out the window at piles of shoes and gold teeth to tabulate.

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Re:Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete ... by bigyabai on Sunday June 08, 2025 @10:38PM (#44221015)
With different executives, that might not have happened. With different tabulators I don't think anything would have changed. You're not really disproving my point by emphasizing that the end operators of these machines were typically Nazis.
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Re:Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete ... by 8note on Monday June 09, 2025 @05:02PM (#44229429)
with different tabulators, it wouldnt have happened, because they would have refused, and protested to make sure no scabs went in to do that work.

workers, especially professionals, have a duty to not do that bad work, and to make sure that that bad work doesnt happen

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