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Doug Black
Doug Black

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Are Google and Facebook Evil?

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)

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sunflower profile image
sunflowerseed

The book "Investing in Vice" has to talk about Google, Facebook, and maybe Amazon in the future.

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3642066 profile image
David Augustus

facebook's antichrist @zuck is evil

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dougblackjr profile image
Doug Black

Dude, thanks for the heads up on the form! I'll ping you when the beta is ready.

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cathodion profile image
Dustin King

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.

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

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"

 
antonfrattaroli profile image
Anton Frattaroli

"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.

 
antonfrattaroli profile image
Anton Frattaroli

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.

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xlebenny profile image
Benny Leung

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")

  • If it's friend, that is good thing, because i have a shortcut to add to friend
  • If it's colleague, that maybe bad thing, because i don't want see them in my private life

Sorry of my English

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

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.

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shubhamsinha profile image
Shubham Sinha

They aren't saints. That's for sure. :D :D

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antonfrattaroli profile image
Anton Frattaroli

The counterargument is that these tools are necessary in this day and age to participate in public discourse. Market failure when people don't have choice.

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antonfrattaroli profile image
Anton Frattaroli

Depends on your own morality, of course, but let's say you believe coercion and fraud are immoral. I could see one making an argument that fraud is in play, because the app users don't understand how their data is used. But contract law doesn't provide good protection for uneducated parties.

I'd say yes. Definitely evil. But not causing enough harm to warrant an intervention by the justice system. At least European lawmakers have attempted to enable avenues for justice to take hold, but it's pretty ineffective.

I guess you could also argue an oligopoly situation (coercive in nature), which would introduce all sorts of regulation and government oversight, which rarely does any good. Not to fault oversight agencies, but they're tasked with the nearly-impossible.

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juanfrank77 profile image
Juan F Gonzalez

Interesting because this statement has certainly been on my mind recently, but I would not necessarily call them "evil". That's what they ultimately got themselves into. For better perspective on this (on the Facebook case) I recommend the medium article written by Nat Eliason

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman

I'd say no. Everyone acts in their own self-interest, including these companies. Doing so is not necessarily evil until it is intentionally at the expense of others. But even without intent, it is very easy to infringe on someone else's rights negligently (not considering or taking appropriate precautions) in pursuit of self-interest. It happens all day, every day, and is pretty much the whole reason behind civil court (versus criminal court). The reason this issue is raised to the level of congressional hearings is due to the scale at which it has happened.

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lysofdev profile image
Esteban Hernández

In Capitalist America, business is always right.