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A comment on Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program. Parent comment

Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by uberman on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:05PM (#49778293)
I have a friend who is one one the best programmers I know. He worked for an ad tech company more than a decade ago optimizing time to respond for personalized ad delivery. He was not proud of working to act on fingerprinting to optimize delivery but it was a challenging task and he framed his part as addressing the challenge not the ethics. People in our circle where like "good for you optimizing network delivery to 50ms!" even people who despised the idea of tracking users around the internet to serve them ads.

I'm sure most people who work for flock compartmentalize their jobs to "I work on fingerprinting vehicles" or "I work on advanced OCR", or "I work on creating camera to camera trajectory graphs". This way they don't need to think about (too often) the larger ramifications of what they are doing. When the press points out what is the reality and that most people are pissed at Flock then the employees likely have to confront what they do in a way that they never had to.

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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by loeg on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:14PM (#49778389)
It is also reasonable for employees to hold the position that Flock is a public good and the vocal minority of people complaining about it are simply wrong.
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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by SoftTalker on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:23PM (#49778468)
This isn't an uncommon opinion among the public either. It's probably a minority, at least among those who are vocal about it, but it's not hard to find people who think they are beneficial.
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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by nilamo on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:40PM (#49778648)
Such an opinion does not seem plausibly believable, by the people building it and in full knowledge of what it can do, and is being used to do.
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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by antonvs on Sunday September 20, 2026 @03:38PM (#49779265)
That’s not a reasonable position to hold, unless and until Flock does much, much more when it comes to safeguards against abuse.

I can understand being pro-surveillance, but Flock is a case study in how not to implement surveillance systems. Believing that surveillance can be a public good can’t somehow turn Flock into a public good. It’s not.

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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by wartywhoa23 on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:10PM (#49778349)
A Milgram experiment in real life.
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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by ndiddy on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:48PM (#49778731)
Good essay about this: https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by bugglebeetle on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:31PM (#49778550)
> he framed his part as addressing the challenge not the ethics

I didn’t know that Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil was something people willfully embraced.

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Re:Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program by lo_zamoyski on Sunday September 20, 2026 @02:20PM (#49778440)
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Perhaps it makes some people uncomfortable about their own jobs. In any case, it's not uncommon for people to moralize about something they're not doing, but given the opportunity to do that thing for some handsome reward (good pay, prestige, technically interesting work, etc), they easily rationalize their choice to participate in that thing.
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