- Would you accept a job offer from FAANG (Facebook, Apple*, Amazon, Netflix, Google) considering employees there design/maintain privacy violating tech?
*Apple is mostly fine - Is your current company privacy-friendly towards its customers? If no – how do you justify it?
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I would only accept a job offer from one of those companies if I was desperate and had no other options. Even then, it would be temporary. I would take the wages while looking for another job.
Where I work now, yes, it’s privacy friendly. We only have work emails and work phone numbers from our customers… no personal information at all except for their names. It’s not perfect though. We are required to use our personal phone devices for work-related apps, and our personal bank cards to book work trips which is reimbursed later. But apart from that it’s ok.
A bit of a nuanced question. At some point people need to get paid to feed themselves and their families, I don’t think it’s right to place all the blame on the workers. It’s clearly leadership saying where to go and lack of laws that prevent it from happening, and workers do it or get fired. Perhaps they can push back, but these places don’t take kindly to going against profit drivers for shareholders. If someone is fired, someone else will take their place.
On the other hand, developers know best about what’s happening, and will take the big paycheck to forget about the rest. But in the current economy, AI scare for jobs, I doubt as many are willing to jump ship for alignment. But I also wish developers used their voices to better protest the rights for everyone. f
From what I see in my workplace, most don’t feel strongly enough to voice their opinion. This is why I need PG stickers to show my beliefs in a passive way at work and spread the word.
I’m currently in a tough spot myself. Won’t go into detail, but would like to find a new job. I currently feel very jaded by tech as a whole to the point I feel most tech companies are just shells of products to get your data. Would like to build things for good, and also not work overtime every week.
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I think it depends on the job nature.
There is no need to escalate everything to morality level.
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Yep. I also think this is a difficult and a quasi impossible way to live. Everyone should do what is best for them while being as good a person they can be. But its important to know you can’t be good for everyone all the time (no one can) and only for you and select people close to you at best, practically speaking.
Cognitive dissonance here is the bitch to tame here but is necessary for your own long term objective growth and progress personally and professionally.
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Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon (GAMMA) each have at least one pretty cool privacy/security/open thing going on, even if the rest of what they do might not be so great. Not sure about Netflix, though
Google has AOSP and the Chromium Open Source project, Apple has Apple Health and Advanced Data Protection, Microsoft has Github and VSCode, Meta has Llama AI and Sapling, and Amazon has optional Ring E2EE I guess.
If one were to work at one of those companies, of course if it is feasible and not too risky, I think it could be pretty admirable to aim to help with one of those good things or to make a bad thing better.
Needless to say, getting food on your plate is kind of important 
. So, if that does seem unfeasible or risky, I think simply doing feasible things like contributing to this community is pretty cool!
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From a privacy standpoint, given that all the companies you’ve named do unethical things, including Apple, you could argue that it is unethical. At the same time, I can understand that in the unequal world that we live in, many people are gonna do whatever they can to earn a decent living and thrive.
That doesn’t mean you can’t call them out, but it’s not always that simple. We agree that everyone deserves due process, even the worst people in the world. But when a lawyer is known to always defend horrible people, we judge them, even though they, themselves, didn’t commit any crime.
On the flip side, you could literally say that working for almost any business is unethical, To the degree that capitalism is exploitative. If you have your products made in China, you are exploiting people.
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I dont work in the Tech sector but if I did, I probably wont judge you if you work for a crappy company.
I draw the line to what is used to solely and actively kill people in a malicious manner, like maybe along the lines of killer drones, Cellebrite, Palantir, etc.
FAANG is Lawful mild evil kind of bad, but not Chaotic Evil levels of badness.
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If we’re cherry picking, Netflix contributes a little bit to improving FreeBSD!
I think it certainly can be as these companies contribute quite a bit to open source, maybe selfishly for their own needs but that benefits us all. Yes, even Facebook does.
The answer really depends on whether or not the position is right for you, and whether you don’t mind the workplace.
Even that is contextual depending on where you are and who you are. There’s nothing unethical about defending your homeland from an invader. Not really sure what you mean by “malicious manner” though. I guess being the invader?
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At least from my conversations from ex-FAANG employees, the ones who left voluntarily or became disillusioned with their work often had worked in some level of public benefit team. I figured that certain teams demand more “humanity” than your run-of-the-mill graduate SDE role.
For example, employees working to counter disinformation or mitigate CSAM. As for personal beliefs, they may care heavily about international events and worker unionization.
I also find quite a lot of crossover between FAANG security engineers and the privacy advocates ironically enough. Go to any infosec community on Mastodon and Bluesky and you’ll see this in action. Perhaps the main concern isn’t the company name but rather the specific team they work in. I wouldn’t judge a Google Cloud Security Engineer as much as someone working with Gemini, Youtube’s search algorithms, or Google Ads.
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Absolutely. I would accept a position based on the working environment and how competitive the compensation is.
I own all of their stocks in my investment portfolio. I could hardly sneer at working for a firm I’m fine with benefiting from owning a (very tiny) portion of.
If someone really thinks these companies are truly evil, as opposed to annoying or just greedy, then they need some perspective in their lives. I’d recommend a tour of Sudan, Somalia, Xinjiang, North Korea, Yemen, or Gaza to correct their myopia.
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I mean yes to some degree, but also things can be relatively bad and harmful in context to where they are.
Otherwise we’d cure lots of mental illnesses and problems if it were like that. You’re feeling depressed and you live in the US? Think about you not being North Korea - now you’re ready for your tap dancing shoes.
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The funny part is, I actually worked at Microsoft, that on a product which is basically workplace surveillance. I hated it.
I never wanted to work at Microsoft long-term, but as the job market got worse I effectively got trapped. I ended up having to resign and move to self-employment just to keep my sanity.
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What kind of work did you pivot to?
I run a VPS host now.
Yes, the VPS hosting industry is super competitive, but I’m still managing to get a few sales.
The real issue is to get non-discounted sales but a few people have recommended me already.
Should it fail maybe I’ll become a sysadmin or network engineer or something of that sort.
This is true.
I worked on a team at Microsoft which is basically workplace surveillance, maybe not the most obvious dragnet surveillance but still monitors and aggregates Office app metrics.
And no wonder why I refuse to use Microsoft products unless I really need to, like for working with a parent who refuses to use anything but Microsoft.
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For me, this mostly ends up being for official paperwork or government related documentation where Office and Adobe Reader is the only thing they use to authenticate and verify digital docs.
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Google has TAG and Microsoft has some offices against large-scale disinformation
Ironically, some of the big tech companies are causing a lot of harm in these countries (Twitter in India, Meta in Myanmar and Palestine, …).