Just a question I've been pondering lately. I'm working on a side hustle called Engauge Analytics, something like Google Analytics with a machine learning component. But, I tagged this "Analytics Without the Evil".
It was right around the time that the Facebook Cambridge Analytics scandal happened, and I think I coined it on a whim. It also comes at a time when Facebook, Twitter, and Google (well, not Google) are all sitting before the US Congress to discuss foreign influence in elections and other data issues.
So, I guess, my question is....
Are Google and Facebook and the like that use our personal data for their own good evil? Are their actions in these circumstances wrong?
Latest comments (36)
The book "Investing in Vice" has to talk about Google, Facebook, and maybe Amazon in the future.
facebook's antichrist @zuck is evil
Dude, thanks for the heads up on the form! I'll ping you when the beta is ready.
We might call a human evil if they consistently made moral choices to do evil instead of good. I don't think it necessarily makes sense to label people in this way, but we'll go with that.
Corporations don't make moral choices, they make economic ones. They might emulate human morality by engaging the morality of their human employees, but this is mostly camouflage. At best, a corporation's culture might have a vestigial morality left over from when the corporation was a small business, but it will likely be turned into a marketing tool.
Privacy is dead, and it is not coming back.
The best we can do is ensure that information is available to all, not just accumulated in the dungeons of these companies.
And I mean truly available, not just "let the authenticated user download a zip of only their raw unprocessed inputs if they want"
"The president now uses Twitter... everybody uses Twitter... All 50 governors, all 100 senators, every member of the House has a Twitter account. So this has become a... crucially important channel of political communication." - Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan
Granted, that was a case about whether North Carolina could bar sex offenders from social media, but the implications are pretty clear.
Headline from earlier this year: Federal judge rules Trump's Twitter account is a public forum.
The question has also been posed pretty frequently lately in relation to concerns that have arose over partisan censorship.
It is good or evil is decided by how affect with you life
For example, facebook can search user by phone number
(Actually it will show at "People you may know")
Sorry of my English
Yes. They support laws that help entrench their monopolies and infringe on individual rights, a free market, and free speech.
They definitely mean to be doing this, it's not an accident, it's not just business as usual.
They aren't saints. That's for sure. :D :D