Do programmers have morals?
Every time I see news about a company that is tracking their users without their consent, I always think about the people behind these systems. Someone has to be there to design it, tell people about it and implement it. Take, for example, the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which
personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising, without having the informed consent of users for that purpose.
If you think about it, they built something that potentially influences their own family member's opinions and thoughts by utilizing their personal data without their real acknowledgment. How does one not feel some kind of guilt when they create tools which only serve to invade the privacy or others for the sole purpose of profit? Do the programmers that created the huge data broker industry feel proud that they can probably search for their loved ones and potentially get their address, phone number and interests?
Seriously, in Cambridge Analytica's presentation about how they delivered extremely personalized messages to people in order influence their voting, they boast that they have
somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand individual data points on every adult in the United States.
This is a very serious issue that has not been yet resolved, and I believe will become even bigger because of new technology. But I do not want to focus on this particular incident—it is just one of the endless privacy intrusions scandals. What I want to focus is on the people behind them.
This topic is nuanced, and I do not think one can make statements about the motives of such individuals lightly. There are a plethora of factors involved with the people that partake in the creation of behemoths akin to Facebook:
- peer pressure;
- not knowing the full picture;
- need of money;
- lies and trust;
- etc.
However, I believe that there is a point at which you close your eyes because the money, status or reward is too big to not want it. When you get a job offer at Facebook in 2025, I can't really accept that you didn't know about any of their shady activities that they actually continue to do even now. I get it—you will work at a "FAANG", will have such a strong resume, will get lots of money and will work with the cutting edge—but you will be the one to implement the next system which will be part of a data privacy scandal. Is it worth it? For me, it isn't. I do have to say, again, that this topic is nuanced. I am sure there are people which are not involved in such things, but at the very least they contribute to increasing the profits of a company that persistently tries to get away with not caring about people's privacy.
This does not stop at companies, but governments are to blame as well. Edward Snowden has showed us that the US which we were being told is a bastion of freedom, takes the freedom to scour literally every millimeter of information about us with no regards to who it is being done to. In his book, Permanent Record, he notes that
Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of "can we," not "should we." And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and use.
You make cookies in order to store user preferences? Actually, let us abuse it to the point that browsers implement features for disabling and controlling it. You want to use your phone to access the internet, letting you finally view maps and look up things you want to know in the moment? Alright, but we will also log all the interactions you do so we can serve you better ads! Should we do these things just to get more money? No, but our greed won't let us stop.
And yet again, it is us, programmers, that chose to get paid to implement such things. Just as how governments are voted by people (at least, some are), we also vote for companies by choosing where we work at. Yes, I know it sounds unrealistic, because in some part it is. We don't have the freedom to work at any company we desire, but we do have the choice of at least prioritizing companies that value good morals and not only profits. I get that we, too, mostly optimize for high salaries, but we need to stop trying to create a dystopia for ourselves, by ourselves.
I have been in a similar situation before. I have worked at an analytics company which focused on creating solutions for tracking and ingesting personal data. At first, I was not internalizing the fact that I am a person which deliberately tries to use privacy-respecting services and software, while at the same time I was developing the opposite. However, at one point, I just could not continue doing it. I felt guilt and I thought I was being a hypocrite. Because of this, I chose to stop working at that company and had a few months in which I did not earn any income and actually lost potential income, since I was to get a raise just when I quit.
I want to end on a quote of Mahatma Gandhi:
The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.