Obviously the difference of degree on the spectrum between the two in this case does vary greatly, but your comment reminded me of an interview with a journalist who had compiled a collection of interviews with midtier drug dealers in various cartels and one thing that stood out to him was that almost all of them, when asked why they did what they did, would respond by saying that if they didn't someone else would.

Yeah, but it's multiple orders of magnitude apart.

Are we also going to start putting LLM engineers to the fire because they're accelerating the enshitification of our world? Probably not.

Unless you were in the US. There it always worked.

It's perfectly valid in our increasingly enshittified world to be angry with all those responsible for it. As much as you're right to point the finger a the C-suites, ultimately ALL of these user-hostile features, every single one, only exists because devs keep putting fingers to keyboards in exchange for checks.

Tech workers had a time where unionization and getting a voice in our companies was very much on the table, and the biggest voices among us shouted down the others in the name of rockstar salaries and free beer at the office. The "top contributors" at huge companies were scared shitless that they might have to accept a wage too much like the REST of their software engineer coworkers. The horror.

Blame goes to everyone involved. From the decision makers to the implementors

You were just following orders, that's a great argument

I don’t know what standards you are referring to, but yea I would call it flagrantly unethical for sure.

Same reason people lobby for fracking or sell mass surveillance software.

We need regulation, yes, but also people who have a sense of goodness. We can’t legislate every aspect of a respectable society.

Now I'm being super pedantic, but every town can't have the same "landmark" law. What makes a law a "landmark" is that other municipalities look to it for direction.

In a world where the California law exists, and the New York Times has been used as an example of the success of that law for years already, claiming some sort of moral victory with the "landmark" qualifier is objectively wrong.

Does any of this matter? No, but I like arguing about it.

No, you've found the person who (1) remembers Civil Procedure from the first year of law school [0], particularly the case of International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945) [1], (2) did some checking to make sure that between then and now nothing significant has changed (it hasn't--International Shoe is still the foundational case in this area), (3) remembers several large non-California companies California has successfully enforced its consumer protection and privacy laws against and several non-Illinois companies Illinois has enforced its similar laws against.

"Minimum contacts" is a good term to include in searches if you want to learn more on this.

[0] Note: I am not a lawyer. Near the end of law school I decided I'd rather be a programmer with a decent knowledge of law than a lawyer with a decent knowledge of programming.

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/310/