Might I suggest to instead reflect on why you are working in an industry that collects all this data.

Are you sure that not even the most mediocre insider threat program doesn’t have this accounted for? Especially when they’re an industry that knows itself well?

They will find out. And act accordingly. And your career will end, with the mess cleaned up and billable to you.

If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening.

Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.

The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.

But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.

NARRATOR: It wasn’t.

If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.

It's a wakeup call: there's a lot of money in the mass surveillance industry

>Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies

No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.

It wasn't a hypothetical future back in the time of DoubleClick.

In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."

What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself.

I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.

People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.

Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.

Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.

The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.

I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed.

Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted.

Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it.

The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.

Don't lump me in that "we". I did no such thing. I know exactly how it could be abused and have spent 12 years intentionally not working for companies that perpetuate it.

From day one everyone who worked on these ad-tech surveillance systems knew they had the capability for abuse. They were built to come as close as possible to the legal limits of surveillance and in several notable cases crossed that line. This isn't a surprise to anyone

There was a narrative here earlier that I'd rather trust Google/Apple with my data than any other company or any government. The end result is the same in the end. When it comes to privacy, the only thing that works is zero trust.

It was always intended to be used that way, the programmatic advertising industry is a product of US Nat Sec.

>They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants.

Noem at the Senate hearing : "Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to ..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832512

Exactly.

While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".

Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.

Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.

Please do not stop using our product. Download this proprietary app. You can't (legally) know what it does. Please download and execute it. Please don't google the FSF or EFF. Please.

I've argued for a long time that adblocking isn't just a quality of life thing, it's an essential security control for browsing the Internet in the same way that patching your system and running malware protection is. I didn't expect it to be protecting your physical security quite so soon..

This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.

Do one better, block ads and give them false data on your profile using a solution like Ad Nauseam.

It's not about blocking ads, but blocking tracking. If you connect to internet you are being tracked even though you block known tracking URLs.

e.g. Hacker news uses no tracking url but uses Cloudflare which tracks the user across sites for things like bot detection.

Not sure that blocks device ID tracking through timing metrics for example. You can turn off java but then you become a beacon of suspicious activity.

Look at this topic in the meta-level. It has a relatively low number of upvotes, extremist comments being actively upvoted - with the current top post suggesting people engage in sabotage, with many if not most dissenting views ending up flagged. This isn't exactly a productive nor interesting topic, because people are more interested in attacking people and circle jerking, rather than engaging in any sort of interesting discussion. So it ends up reading like the typical slop on Reddit, which is essentially where discussion goes to die. It's not great seeing that sort of stuff here as well.

Digital brownshirts, using moderation tools as weapon to stifle discussion critical of the regime.

You know when you have corrupt organizations calling themselves exactly what they are not, we are in an authoritarian state. And its moving fast.

It sounds like you’re just looking for another opportunity to bash a group of people that you hate.

Spyware is produced in many countries - although the Israeli ones are very good, because Israelis are very good at what they do.

Ah yes the famous Constitutional freedom to gun down tyrants. It turns out nobody can agree on who the tyrant is!

Unlikely. Other countries will watch and realise how important it is to collect their own data hoards so they can do it too.

For comparison, what is the cost of immigration?

"It's my job - I just followed orders"

In a way Im glad its happening because its going to be a wake up call for many, on the other hand, there is going to be a lot of suffering as a result of this..

Someone please hint ICE that they can get a lot more data from AI companies. Asking what your rights are? Straight to jail.

Uh yeah, it's ok to track and arrest confirmed pedophiles, but not normal people at random

>Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.

I think it needs to go a bit further than that. We need names, for purposes of blacklisting but also future prosecution. Collaborators should not be tolerated.

I'm sure it's not popular, but quite a few of our colleagues and fellow HN readers do belong in cells.

And for Europeans or those in other countries: every dollar spent on these companies is supporting their support of Trump; that's against Greenland, NATO etc. For example, Microsoft donated $1M (IIRC) to Trump for Davos.

At work we have stopped buying new American services, but there's been very little reduction of existing use.

(Yet we did manage a policy stating we won't buy anything from Russia.)

What phone do you use?