I couldn't be true. You're telling me that Meta, of all companies, would be careless with user data and privacy? Totally unbelievable!
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
anyone surprised?
Did the Google guys ever get caught saying that? Or using their power over the company to unsend messages, oh I guess you can't do that with email, but with Messenger you can...
I thought I could name one (GitHub), but after checking, they can (e.g. if requested by law enforcement etc).
Therefore, the total I can name is 0.
The question was not "could the do all shitty things if they were scummy assholes", but "are they all scummy assholes".
Note that this is truthful yet unpopular, which is the opposite of approval-seeking (or trying to "sound cool").
You incorrectly state:
> (the) argument is predicated on condemning every company
yet the argument is that almost every company has at least some staff with read access to databases: "every tech company ... with extremely rare exceptions", "~every" ('~' translates to 'approximately'), and "most companies".
It just seems so implausible. As soon as a company is big enough to hire their first General Legal counsel, you'd think that kind of practice would be flagged as highly legally risky and stopped. I'm reminded of the gcreep[2] incident which happened over 15 years ago. What company wants to go in front of a judge and say their policies allowed something like this?
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179136
2: https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5637234/gcreep-google-enginee...
The story of Joe Nacchio and Qwest is instructive. Though the current environment was borne out of the GWoT, the principle of extra-legal state access to all US telecommunications was established long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001-2007_NSA_warrantless_surv...
It really goes a long way when the law stop saying "it's not nice if" and starts saying "if you can even if you don't then you're guilty".
And that makes sense too. Business culture is very different between IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple. I'm sure we all know the differences
A lot of people actually, even techies. I commented something similar on a different tech website (Ars Technica) highlighting the trustworthiness of the company behind the tool, and that by now people should not be surprised the face eating leopard eats faces. I was met with a lot of implicit defense of Meta and redirecting the attention to "whatabout" Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. (much like sibling reply here makes it an "every tech company" problem). The general agreement in that forum was that the company is not the problem, it's just what AI tooling does.
So either the internet is full of shills, or people are genuinely surprised because they chose ignorance for decades. Or maybe both can be true.
That argument could just as equally validate them ignoring their job altogether and collecting a paycheck from the beach of Aruba.
Yeah, clearly it's the idiot users...
It matters to the people who don't hand over their phone to a stranger. When someone hands of devices to a random stranger it's an exception and it goes against popular wisdom. When Meta does something hostile towards its users they do it for billions and the practice is normalized.
I'd be willing to bet that many, MANY of this stuff in forums are not what we normally think of as shills, as in randos paid by a company to defend them, but regular employees who weirdly take criticism of their employers too personally and lash out to white-knight for them, even though it's not part of their job description.
If you do arrogantly stupid things long enough without a consequence, you'll begin to do them more and in other parts of your life.
What's his tax return look like?
its not incompetent, its designed that way