Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? (nytimes.com)

Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. An anonymous reader shares a report: At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere. That's a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration's policies and the larger role of technology in government.

"You can think you're building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it's really twisted," said Laura Nolan, 38, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company's involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense that could be used to target drone strikes. All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. In recent months, workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.

Comments

Hm, no... it's not OK.

[gosand]

It's OK to use facial recognition as a convenient way to unlock your phone, but not to track you when you walk down the street.
It's OK to use facial recognition as a way to find friends by the pictures they post, but not to track your known associates in defying the government.

The tech is the same, just who uses it. If you want to object to selling it to China, why didn't you object to doing it for InstaFaceTwits?

I think that's kind of the point - it DOES matter what it is being used for. Granted, you can't control how it's used after it's been created, but if you are developing something like facial recognition you KNOW it will be used for nefarious reasons at some point.

There are all kinds of things like this that I refuse to use - facial recognition, fingerprint readers, facebook, smart devices that monitor you (Echo, fitbit, etc.) My location on my phone is turned off, unless I need to use it. Webcams are unplugged when not in use. I'm not naive enough to think that I am still not being tracked by Google et al because we do live in the digital age. But I am not about just to give up all information about myself freely for goofy convenience.