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Comment by Archio | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, did anyone on your team raise any ethical concerns in regards to the potential privacy violation? If not, how was the topic handled by employees/management?

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Not really - we talked about it and expected more consumer concerns from other outlets. This work was not being done in secret, when ACR was the hot item it was well known in the industry how it worked. We figured the the vendors would deal with the issues as they were raised - and they did despite some of the potential of the technology for some cool interactive apps the most part it died.

The difference between what we worked on and what Cognitive/Inscape eventually did and got dinged for was that we were using this technology to build sync to broadcast apps not for tracking viewing and usage habits. The work we did never got to large scale deployments and we honestly forgot a bit about it. I knew what Inscape was doing - nothing secret just kind of in the industry weeds - post Vizio sale but honestly didn't think that much about it until now.

If we expect employees speaking up to fix this, we are going to live in constant disappointment. The pro-privacy people live in a very small, but loud, echo chamber. We need to be proactive with developing pro-privacy technologies if we expect something to be done about this.

The majority of the population and the majority of developers seem to not care at all about intimately targeted ads.

It's not just apathy, it's also because there's often so much you can do without pissing off the management or generally looking like a "bad culture fit". And then they'll get someone else to do it anyway.

At my current job, I don't have any privacy-related issues, but I have to handle occasional clueless ideas from the customer. It usually goes like this:

  They: We want to have this security-related change X.
  Me:   Uh ok... but are you sure it's a good idea? What's your threat model?
  They: ???
  Me:   You see, this change will make it more difficult for user to do Y, with no real
        benefit to security, because A, B and C.
  They: Uh... yes, you're right; let's not do it then.

Fast-forward one or two other attempts at proposing the same change and half a year later, I find the change implemented in the codebase anyway. Turns out some other manager on customer's side asked someone else in my company to implement it.

-.-

I'd expect it wasn't handled. If it comes up, 'Let legal deal with it'.

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