21.3.3. As a Potential Tech Worker#
As a potential worker in the tech industry, you might someday find yourself in a position where you have influence over how social media platforms are designed, programmed, or operated (e.g., you could be a programmer, designer, or content moderator).
We hope that if you find yourself in one of these positions, you consider the ethics of what you are doing. We hope you could then bring those concerns into how you design and implement automated systems for social media sites.
An Example of Action#
As an example of what someone in this position might do, let’s consider this story from Steve Krenzel, who was a software engineer at Twitter from 2015-2017.
With Twitter’s change in ownership last week, I’m probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter.
[…]
Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. A large telco wanted to pay us to log signal strength data in N. America and send it to them.
My plan was to aggregate signal strength by carrier / by location. I worked with Data Science to find a granularity – minimum area size and minimum distinct users per area – that would preserve anonymity even when combined with other sources of data (differential privacy).
When we sent this data to the telco they said the data was useless. They switched their request and said they want to be able to tell how many of our users are entering their competitors’ stores.
A bit sketchier, but maybe workable in a privacy respecting way?
We ran an alternative by the telco. They didn’t like it and were frustrated. So was Sales. I was asked to go to telco’s HQ and figure out exactly what they want.
The subsequent request was absurd.
I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing.
The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.”
I responded with some variant of “No fucking way”.
There was no universe where I was going to help sell granular identifiable user location data.
This led to more internal meetings. Legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS [Terms of Service].
Normally they might find another engineer to do this work, but my whole team was aligned with the privacy concerns. Twitter had also just done layoffs (aside: time is a flat circle), so there were no spare engineers around.
[…]
My last email written at Twitter was to Jack [Twitter CEO]. To his credit, he responded quickly with something to the effect of “Let me look into that and make sure there isn’t a misunderstanding. It doesn’t seem right. We wouldn’t want to do that.”
It was in his hands now.
As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it.
I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data.
And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto.
Sometimes it doesn’t work out, or you have to escalate and risk it back firing, but a good pocket veto is a tool to learn to wield well.
You aren’t likely to end up in a situation as dramatic as this. If you find yourself making a stand for ethical tech work, it would probably look more like arguing about what restrictions to put on a name field (e.g., minimum length), prioritizing accessibility, or arguing that a small piece of data about users is not really needed and shouldn’t be tracked. But regardless, if you end up in a position to have an influence in tech, we want you to be able to think through the ethical implications of what you are asked to do and how you choose to respond.
You can also look at how you can organize with other workers, through things like the Alphabet Workers Union [u14] (Alphabet is the parent company of Google).