What if you were asked to develop something that goes against your morals or beliefs. Would you do it?

PS - they are willing to pay you more that you ask for

@1989 when the atomic bomb was invented the inventors never thought it could a damage like that but it did! What if something that you develpoed become toxic ? Would you be OK with that?

No I'd stick to my morals

@1989 @peacWhis @lxmcf yes I agree!

No

@cha-m-ra they knew very well what they were creating.

Everyone making weapons knows they are used for killing people.

Do for work what you can be proud of.

If what they ask is illegal, it's a whole another story.

@electrineer exactly!!!!

Depends on thing, my morals are vague. Live and let live, money don't smell, but if it was something pretty bad (killing someone ) then no.

@GTom what if you do it and you get to walk away freely without any problem to you!

Nope. Morals.

So that in my case includes anything that would require unnecessary data collection or user tracking or data exploitation.

@AndSoWeCode I like to believe that not all Facebook engineers could have predicted what would happen to it. Because I don’t believe that every Facebook engineer would be able to live with the fact that their code would contribute to a ‘social network’ that would become one of the biggest mass surveillance engines ever created and would even be integrated within the biggest government mass surveillance network ever to be made.

1) If I can do it, someone else can do it. If there's demand, there will be supply.
2) Anything that I make has a positive effect, even if that's proving the world that so much damage can indeed be done.
3) If I disagree with the objective and there's a way, I'll make the product do funny things. Like, for a naval directioning system, let's fuck up common oil paths just slightly, and let them take 20% more risk. (I would love to see a hurricane spreading oil. It would hurt the oil lobby more than anything I could imagine.)

As long as its legal and the pay is really good, sure, why not. Actually build something that goes against my values recently, build a website for a client who does all of that nature/homeopathy stuff. They payed a lot of money for it though.

@linuxxx Facebook takes only what people willingly give, and gives back much more.
I'm a bit of an anthropology geek, and one thing that stands out is the extreme change that society went through with urbanization, and the anonymity that comes with it. People were never like this, not in thousands of years. Lots of stuff didn't work because of that.
Now governments have the means to follow people, just like in the past, just like people follow governments.
There is no other solution for a long term organized society. Governments try to hide, we dig. We hide - governments dig.

As for Facebook - I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Facebook takes data that people give it, protect it as much as people want it protected, and use it to make income with minimum annoyance to visitors, with ads that are, for the first time in history, relevant.
So what's wrong with it?
I've seen much worse stuff that people are happy with.

@muma we don't get decided what wrong or right. Do we? We just do what were asked to do!

@cha-m-ra pretty much, yeah. Obviously I would rather work somewhere where the ideals match mine. But I am not going to be that arrogant to presume that my values are inherently better or worse than those of other people.

Depends. One time I was asked to develop a crypto currency for a group of people I hate with a passion. So I tripled my normal asking price. They said yes. So I agreed.

Mainly because it's the people I hate not the project which I thought was one of the very few non-horrible ideas they had.

Another time I was asked for the formula of a slow burning/high energy compound that would be used to melt a safe open. That time I refused because I oppose theft.

I think if there is enought money I would develop anything since I am a dev and no chemist or engineer my ability to kill people with my work is petty limited. The more it goes against my morals or the laws the higher the pay has to be but I dont think anyone would pass on the option to work for a year to develop a governmental mass surveilance virus (add your own negative buzz words here) if they pay 1,000,000,000$

Life's too short to do things you don't wanna do, assuming it's not your only option between that and starvation

Looks like you've never played the game Uplink.

@mee4895 If they offered me a billion dollars for a year of work, I'd never take it.

That kind of money simply isn't paid to a salaried individual/contractor. There has to be something shady going on.

It just plain old violates the cost-value principle.

Plus, there's always the possibility that I'd be made the scapegoat if the authorities come after the perpetrators, and then: lifetime jail/execution and bye bye billion.

@cst1992 I think in most controversial cases even if it is illegal shit there will be someone cheaper than me. (For the record I never was/am or will be considering doing illegal or highly controversial jobs this is just hypothetical)
And about the scapegoat thing most of the rants here suggest that we devs are the scapegoats in most cases so that is kind of expected anyways.

@AndSoWeCode I’ll comment when home, still have to comment on another privacy thread and tired as fuck but fuck it, I’ll stand for what I fucking stand for.

@linuxxx (a comment so I can find this on desktop)

@AndSoWeCode What people willingly give?! Oh, so I am willingly giving all those website visit's to facebook? And more than 15K data points ranging from religion to whether I smoke or not? Nope.

If my parents/sister had known before I told them that those pesky like/comment buttons on webpages give away pages/website views/visits to facebook which can be linked to facebook accounts even, they'd have installed blocking software a long time ago.

Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, many people I know have quit their facebook account once they started to realise how much data facebook actually gathers from them. Things like facebook collecting call logs/texts when giving the app certain permissions disguised as "finding friends/family more easily" aren't as obvious as one might think. I know a lot of people who were not aware of that and found it in their facebook archives and were honestly shocked by the amount of shit it collects without making it very clear that it actuallly collects it.

What long term organized solution are you talking about? Because in my book, the mass (and my I add, literally, illegal) surveillance/data collection is, as said a few words before, literally illegal.

When did the mass tracking and data collection of law abiding citizens become socially acceptable?

The fun thing is that some privacy groups are actually having victories with dragging the UK intelligence agencies to court and fighting them for, by law defined, illegal mass surveillance programs. Of course they'll continue as nobody can stop them really but it does show that they privacy groups are actually fucking right.

So no, I can't think of anything that makes the way facebook handles users/data/surveillance anywhere near acceptable.

@linuxxx "Oh, so I am willingly giving all those website visit's to facebook?" - you're giving them to the website, and as soon as you accept cookies, the website chooses to send it to Facebook. Of course it's more streamlined than this description, but that's the gist of it.

As for liking something - you tell Facebook you like something, what did you expect? As soon as I joined Facebook, I was greedy with my likes, and I still am, on any platform I go. That was more than 10 years ago.

@linuxxx "When did the mass tracking and data collection of law abiding citizens become socially acceptable?" - the first time humans were able to see. Thousands of years. It was called gossip and other stuff. Society formed around it. I've read many anthropologists attribute gossip to one of the main reasons why human societies evolved over time.

That's pretty much mass surveillance.

And it's been going on in the modern era too, before Facebook. Credit ratings, bank transactions, health records, etc.

Sure, Facebook knows what you like and who you relate to. But credit rating agencies have known about all of your contracts, payments and so on, decades before Facebook was even invented. And before credit rating agencies, it was called "townsfolk".

Europe is pretty much alone in this privacy paranoia, and it's hurting them pretty badly. They're now almost a decade behind, technologically, because of it.

Oh, come on, you never know how the story may end and what the customer's goals are. It is always possible to find common ground. The main thing is to offer something that is impossible to refuse, and it will work from both sides. We have a great partnership with the development team at iwanta.tech