Their directors certainly are. A friend's mother works in a high-level consultancy that is known for turning down lucrative-but-unethical projects. I've worked in a company where the CEO would always try to find a win-win, even if it cost the company financially. I've also worked in a company where the CEO/majority owner vociferously abused the directors when he wasn't allowed a vote when they were voting on his own payrise (the directors saying that it was illegal to do so). That company also played a lot of three-card monte with FDA auditors.

Companies can behave ethically; just because they're not an organism doesn't mean that they're not under the control of something that can make those decisions. A car is just a lump of matter. Can't do anything by itself. But stick a human into it, and it can do all sorts of things, from the mundane (collecting groceries) to the charitable (distributing meals) to the unethical (hit-and-run). A company is the same.

Add into this that Facebook has been shown to be openly selling fraudulent products, and it doesn't make it sound like Facebook is the innocent you're implying. Crack open youtube and search for 'veritasium facebook', there are a couple of videos - Facebook is essentially selling advertising with fake impressions.

I'd argue that Facebook has made a lot of decisions that exploit users in pursuit of making more money and acquiring more personal data -- and that we don't have to be happy a technology platform with a lot of promise is now tied to a company with a record of making such decisions.

I won't welcome a Facebook platform in to my life the same way I would a standalone piece of technology, precisely because of the kind of decisions made by Facebook.

IT ethics means that you use your expertise to actively protect sensitive information. They don't do that, and there can be / will be / are consequences. If anybody could have pushed an effective self-hosting platform, it's them, but they haven't.

They are at the bottom of the ethical barrel.

But they are also made of some less formal structures. Groups of people that believe privacy is important will be predisposed to assume that disrespecting that tenet will affect profit and the companies operating environment later. Even if this is not the case perhaps a company gains additional political capital in some area for it's behaviour and no single product is likely to be worth the loss of that clout.

If you take factors like these into account you can judge whether a company is predisposed to create outcomes you'd say are good or bad based on it's previous actions.

As to FB and the wages I do not give them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that it wasn't them acting on some outpouring of principal but purely needing the engineers as they grow more than they needed depressed wages. This may be unfair to them but their past actions do not align well with a more generous interpretation, though give it a few years with similar incidents and I'd reevaluate in their favour(I'd love to see it but I wouldn't hold my breath).

Facebook is run by a man who got rich on selling private data to advertisers, and then used his billions to buy all the mansions surrounding his own mansion so that he could protect his privacy.

Zuckerberg is scum and this is a sad day for any fan of the Oculus.

the last thing I would want is for my house to be surrounded by people who won bidding wars just to own property near me.

it's not like he bought all the surrounding lots and kicked the residents out; iirc he actually went out of his way to essentially set up a pseudo reverse mortgage for one older couple.

That's hypocrisy. He's repeatedly gone on record stating that he believes peoples' lives should be fully open and shared.

But he doesn't want his own life to be open and shared?

If you're referring to the fact that it was reported yesterday that Facebook refused to participate in the "no poaching" agreement between Apple, Google, and other companies, it is worth noting that Facebook's CEO is involved in a totally different, and probably much more permanent and far-reaching strategy for suppressing engineer salaries:

http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-...