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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

It is Google’s fault for creating a product that can be abused in such a way that would allow for these outsized and egregious invasions of individual privacy

In every other engineering discipline you are required to understand the impacts and uses of what you build.

This is what an “environmental impact study” is - and despite what people might think of how they are used - the core purpose and reason they are key to engineering is because second and third order effects are real, impactful and frankly mitigation costs a lot.

Unfortunately, we never actually developed such a practice in software development outside of cases where hard engineering was leading such as in defense, nuclear or other very highly regulated, lethal, or martial industries.

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This argument can be extended to anything, which suggests it might not add any value to the discussion.

- You make Microsoft Excel. Someone uses Excel to leak a million people’s PII.

- You build shovels. Someone murdered someone with your shovel.

- You build an analytics product, explicitly ban collecting PII in your EULA, someone does it anyway.

It’s fun to be outraged and hating on GA is very in vogue at the moment, but this specific incident is just someone (yes, someone, not a nefarious company) using a popular tool incorrectly.

> You build shovels. Someone murdered someone with your shovel.

In the US, we do do this with firearms, though generally the winning cases tend to be focused around advertising strategies

Well, I’ll tell you what the answer is not: ignoring these externalities, and assuming they are someone else’s problem

This is my least favorite part of product development, which is the part where people who like developing stuff just arbitrarily decide when to stop caring about what the product is used for, and then fighting the rest of the world on that design decision because it’s obstinately “simply their product and their choice.”

I don’t know anything more antisocial or lacking in responsibility than taking on the responsibility of being a leader, promoting your services or product to other people via advertising and marketing and then shirking all responsibility when people say your product is being used to harmi other people.

As long as you get paid and do only the things that ONLY you think are important, that’s that’s the kind of society we want to build, right?

I agree, these shovel makers need to be held accountable for their cavalier attitudes about how their products are used by murders to bury people, which is concealing evidence and that is a crime. As long as they get their fat shovel checks, it doesn't matter to them. Is this the society we want? Where murders are helped along the way by these fat cat shovel makers?

> This argument can be extended to anything, which suggests it might not add any value to the discussion.

Excel has many primary benefitial purposes, it wasn't built for leaking PII.

Shovels likewise are useful for a benefitial purpose, they are not made for beating people up.

Third party spyware ("analytics") has only one purpose, collect data from unsuspecting customers. They have no valid benefitial purpose, if one accepts that spying is not kosher.

Is it Husqvarna’s fault if I use a chainsaw carelessly and amputate myself?

It depends. That’s the point.

In the past, machinery didn’t have covers over what are now internal moving parts. The law changed that.

Yes but some tools which are useful and important are inherently dangerous to oneself or others. There is only so much you can do to make them safer before you have to make the operator assume responsibility for using them properly.

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