Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge
by ditonal on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @04:39PM
(#9299723)
You don't make any case for your argument. If one person is making a car, and another person is looking to buy a car, you are contributing value to society by matching them up to make a transaction.
I don't dispute that advertising can be unethical, or that many of these big tech companies have faced some difficult decisions and debatably have made the wrongs ones. But you can do unethical things in any industry, and advertising is not fundamentally unethical.
Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge
by joepie91_ on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @08:59PM
(#9300925)
Advertising absolutely is inherently unethical - manipulation is a core component of it. That's the difference between an advertisement and a listing.
Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge
by ditonal on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @12:04AM
(#9301496)
AdWords is basically a listing, directed at the most appropriate audience. You seem to be mixing up advertising and marketing.
Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge
by joepie91_ on Monday April 06, 2015 @02:32AM
(#9326898)
It is absolutely not. If it were a listing, it'd list the name and nothing else. The description text is supposed to be persuasive.
Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge
by sarciszewski on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @03:38PM
(#9299306)
I could go out and create malware, for example, but I don't think most people would appreciate that. :(
Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge
by cookiecide on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @08:09AM
(#9302975)
Well, it's debatable, but I'd argue that exposing serious issues in the presumed robustness of systems turns out to be useful in the long run. In the worst case, it provides another data point for identifying systems that aren't working how they should.
Not that I'm advocating the creation of malware, of course. Don't do that. :)
Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge
by sarciszewski on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @11:38AM
(#9304422)
There's a difference between malware and a 0day. Malware just causes harm to the endpoint. A 0day proves that the potential for a security breakdown is real.
The problem is that advertising is inherently unethical, so that reasoning doesn't hold up.
> What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need?
That only holds up if those other $40 were to spontaneously appear from thin air - but it doesn't, and that difference is coming from somewhere. It means that somewhere, some group of people had to collectively pay $40 more for something, to pay for your salary.
> Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive.
No, it's really not. "Going out and creating something" is not automatically something desirable, if the "something" being created is unethical.