The weirdest part of this is that it apparently made voice calls to landlines? Why would they do that, it makes no sense. Unless maybe that's what the phone company does if you text a landline? Never tried it but I would be surprised...
If you send a text to a landline, a lot of providers will convert it to a phone call using some sort of text-to-speech API. I've done this by accident on older cell phones when I'd add someone's landline to a text message instead of their mobile number. This sounds like a nightmare scenario though for this poor chap and his family (and his dentist).
It's a reasonably standard thing in the UK. Useful at times, really annoying at other times... You can get landline phones that will actually receive the texts as texts; other phones get calls.
I remember when I was a kid in... it must have been 2005 or earlier, when I was at a friends house and they had this, it was literally the coolest thing in the world. A phone that spoke text messages? My god, it's the future! Novelty wore off fast once I entered adulthood because it's never a text message I want to hear. Who knew I could claim my PPI back?! bah
Various API that let you send SMS will make a call if the SMS can't be delivered, and then use text-to-speech to read the thing out to you. It's fairly obnoxious really.
And some, like Telia in Sweden, will keep calling until you listen to a certain percentage of the message to helpfully ensure that you've gotten the message. Which is loads of fun if, for example, someone sends you a link with a UUID--you basically have to pull the phone off the hook and let it finish before you stop receiving the calls.
(You can also contact your phone company and ask them to please remove this "feature" - but usually you have to be subjected to it before you know the phone company even does this!)
Great, we have a few more convinced not to use Path. One application will now have perhaps a few hundred less users. What about the rest of the permission-hungry apps? Whatsapp? Facebook? Any Google app? Any other big developer's app? What if the founders of Path just start a new company?
Not installing Path is not a solution here. You gotta look critically at the permissions an app uses and their terms of service (at least skip to the privacy related issues, though they usually try to hide and obfuscate them). If there is something you don't entirely trust, wonder why you really need that app. Perhaps it's an improvement for your life, but can't you really live without? You've gone without that app for the past how many years? Is it worth giving up your phone book and all sdcard contents?
Path seems like a company which is doing everything wrong these days. My peeve with them is that I signed up and used it happily for a long time because it should be possible to get my data exported later. Now they have removed that from the FAQ/Support and their support mails are just ignorant saying "not possible but the team will look into it".
Totally agree with the sentiment.
I believe that companies have DNA, and that most companies do not change over time, they just get better at hiding the bad stuff. I would probably trust a company that starts off of the right foot (e.g. Google) even when it becomes larger, than trust one that's built off – what I consider to be – shady growth strategies.
Path seems to be taking especially egregious steps. All the UI polish in the world can't hide shady business practices.
We'd see a lot less abusive behavior from startups if investors went to zero when it happened.
As it stands, $800k is a line item equal to only 2% of the money Path has raised. As such, I doubt that anybody who invested in it cares or views this as anything other than a triviality that a few nerds will care about.
I have been a Path user since the app launched and have never had any text messages sent to my address book. Path informed users that the address book data hook was no longer there and that all data had been removed from their services after the initial FTC inquiry. I took that at face value but after this article I would be interested in hearing a response from the company about how my information is handled.
This is a feature while signing up if you use Facebook. It shows your friends with a phone number and if you don't uncheck them before tapping ‘next’, it will invite them.
Remember when a while back they downloaded far too much information from each phone (for the convenience of connecting you to people)? Everyone was surprised (some outraged) and then they pushed an update to stop that "feature" and when the CEO/Boss man posted a blog entry apologizing, everyone forgave the company, people were holding hands singing Kumbaya.
Haha, yes! It's very important to feel you're in control, just like you want to feel like you're making a wise decision when you reach for the conveniently placed junk in the supermarket isles.
I get the feeling that either those in charge are hopelessly detached from society to see how privacy is perceived by the rest of us (like Zuckerberg) or there's little to no vetting when it comes to implementation decisions.
This kind of thing sits alongside "it is important that justice is seen to be done" in my list of phrases that will preclude you from being taken at face value ever again.
Kind of. In law, actual justice is obviously the top priority, but it's also important for social stability and the effectiveness of the courts that justice appear to be done. (Otherwise, people may not respect court decisions even when they are just, etc.) Luckily, these two properties are usually complimentary. Given actual justice, the appearance of justice usually follows through transparency and the like.
They're doing it exactly backwards. The Right Way is to hold off on the massive user privacy violations until you become huge. At that point enforcing the laws against you becomes too difficult and expensive, so the government won't bother; and if some random AG tries to do it anyway you can afford to buy whatever changes to the laws you need to get him off your back. Problem solved.
Of course it was a bug. It seems clear to me they were experimenting with some texting functionality where Path would notify users of things, it made it to production with bugs, and some subset of users got this terrible behaviour.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
It would need to be about three bugs. First, there's the bug where users who say that Path can't have their address books get their address books sent to Path. Second, there's the bug where their servers think the user has photos that he does not have. Third, there's the bug where their servers think the user wants to share these photos with Path's list of phone-number contacts for that user.
This does not seem like the most likely scenario to me.
What are the reasons that make you so sure, though? To me, it's not clear at all just from the symptoms that it is a bug. It could just as well be a feature they're only testing out on 0.1% of the user base to see how their engagement or whatever improves.
Collecting and using my private info to, say, recommend friends in their UI is something I could imagine a product manager doing on purpose. Creepy, but you can see why they would think this is helpful. Spamming every number in my phone book with texts about photos that don't exist at 6am is not something I could imagine a product manager doing on purpose.
Oh, I can easily see possible scenarios. For example: have a functionality when you add a contact to the list of contacts, send her a message welcoming her, after asking the user if it's OK. Reuse the same code in the part of the application where you initialize the database from existing contacts. Put wrong defaults there so that the code does not ask "send welcome message?" (because that'd be stupid - of course you don't want to ask somebody 200 times for each of the entries in initial import) but still sends one. Boom! - initial import causes 200 welcome messages to be sent. Happens more than you'd like. Something like that happened to me too, in different form and was caught in testing, nowhere near production, but still.
Path seems to do all the shady things with your data that we fear Google and Facebook could do. FB and G definitely push the boundaries of privacy/creepy sometimes, but Path seems to have no qualms about blowing right past them. I am staying away.
The impact is also smaller, FB has 1 billion or so accounts and Google probably has about the same. Plus, they can track every move you make across the web, things you like, searches you make, what type of content you email, share etc.
If Path grows, I hope they just die (two strikes is enough for me!) more and more people will look under the hood.
It reminds of one of Facebook's early growth tactics - as part of the contact import process, they'd send out spam IMs to all your contacts saying you just joined Facebook and ask if they wanted to join. It was very shady.
Why is it even possible for this to happen? Did someone really think it was a bright idea to provide an API to access people's personal data, and if so, why doesn't the phone tell them that before letting them install the app?
On top of all of that, why wouldn't the phone provide a setting to restrict all personal/identifying information from being accessed by the app?
Right, this form of security is completely ineffective. It’s just like Vista’s Universal Access Control modals: after being shown the first few of the day, you would stop reading them. I suspect EULAs are written to exploit this phenomenon: no-one reads EULAs because they go on forever, so you can bury all kinds of outrageous conditions in there.
All of the smartphones I have used ask you before allowing access to your contacts. But many apps want to use these for legitimate purposes -- for example, Vine uses them to find people you're already friends with.
It's all about trusting what that company is saying "now".
They can change later and spam your list or use it for some other purpose. You can shame them publicly if you find it out. But then, it's already too late by that time.
Address book access is a permission just like anything else (internet access, for example), so it can fly under the radar. Android has been trying to make things like "send text messages" stand out a tad more than "write to local storage", but they may need to go even further.
This is pathetic. I'm glad I've never found a use for this pile of garbage but this is like the fourth or fifth time I've read about something exactly like this happening. This company has no respect for users or privacy.
Deactivating your account just effectively hides your profile. You're only a couple clicks away from having it all restored if you so choose. They seem quite good at finding ways to screw up, surely they can still find a way to do this until they actually remove your data.
This privacy policy is a joke. It basically says "we can do anything we like with your data".
Under the "What Information Do We Share With Third Parties?" section there are some classic deceptions. This one is great (as in evil genius):
>with certain social networking services, if you allow such sharing through our services; //
Not consent, allow. As in if you don't actively prevent it we'll do it.
>with service providers who are working with us in connection with the operation of our site or our services //
We'll sell you out to anyone who we can describe as "working with us".
>"in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing or acquisition, or in any other situation where personal information may be disclosed or transferred as one of our business assets."
So when doing business-y stuff, blah, blah oh yeah and any time we want to use your info as a business asset. They're covering themselves, again, to sell all data to anyone who'll buy it.
Why? Having worked on a semi social app last year, deleting a user and all their content was a huge undertaking. Marking them and their content as deleted was simple and had the exact same effect--user and content never get returned from DB queries. Guess which one we implemented?
I guess I'm trying to say sites don't (always) do the deactivate thing because of some nefarious scheme to steal your content/identity at a later date. Sometimes it's just a technical call (or lazy programmers, depending on your point of view).
This might be off topic but I loved reading that post, it turned into comedy gold. The time I was at the third... (I don’t have any photos to share with them) I was giggling. And the list of people path called at the end killed me.
For those with WordPress installs who want to survive an HN frontpage:
1. if you don't have sudo, use the W3 Total Cache plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
2. if you have sudo:
2a. the easy way: apt-get install memcached, add the pecl memcache extension, and use object-cache.php http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/memcached/trunk/object-cache.php and batcache http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/
2b. the hard way: varnish https://www.varnish-cache.org/ https://github.com/pkhamre/wp-varnish
One of my clients wanted me to implement the same thing for his iOS app. I told him, that I think it is illegal and if it is not, that it should be. Anyway, I never wrote that code.
This certainly sounds like a bug in their Android app and not a malicious thing that they did. Path is headed up by some smart people. I have a hard time believing that they would willing blast out texts to everyone in an address book considering what they just paid the FTC. Then again, it's possible that it was a user error while trying to uninstall the app. There certainly is an option to invite people to path right there in the sidebar.
Apps can't send text messages without the user knowing it on iOS, you have to tap Send for each one of them, so this couldn't have affected App Store rankings.
You presume the app sent it and not their servers or a partner service provider. They already grab your address book, including phone numbers. They don't need you after that.
In that case don't you think we would have seen many more reports of this shady practice? This seems to me a combination of purposefully bad UI and the user not paying attention.
Still the same practice spammers use, but very different from "covertly uploading my contacts data and texting everyone without telling me".
> The case originated with two lawsuits claiming that Classmates.com had sent out millions of deceptive e-mails telling users that an old friend was trying to contact them, and had viewed their profile or signed their "guestbook." For the great majority, that wasn't true; no one at all had shown an interest in their profile. About 60 million users were contacted, and about 3 million actually took the bait, paying between $10 and $40 to Classmates.
Classmates.com was sued in 2008 for sending emails claiming former classmates were searching for you. Similar, but Classmates.com was actually requiring a paid subscription before telling you there wasn't actually anyone on the other end.
Simple math is all it takes to understand why this is pervasive. In the classmates.com example, they collected upwards of $75 million in revenue from this scheme, and only had to dish out $2.75 million for the settlement several years later. So for any newcomers, this type of bait is an attractive business proposition; the potential lawsuit years down the line can simply be attributed to cost of revenue. And you'll obviously only get sued if there's money to be won, which means the scheme was a success, so in other words, you want to get sued. The real problem is the judgments/settlements are an order of magnitude lower than they should be.
There's the hidden cost of permanently alienating potential customers, though, which will show up silently in reduced conversion on all subsequent advertising efforts.
Another hook might be a violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) which has been interpreted to prohibit automatically sending text messages without the recipient's consent. The statutory damages are $500 per incident.
Maybe it's time to create a Hippocratic Oath for developers to publicly commit to?
A future Path developer could then refuse to implement an unethical "feature" by pointing out that the company had hired them with the full knowledge that the oath had been undertaken.
I don't think the company would pink slip the developer, as they would probably want to avoid any attention being drawn to the unethical "feature" in a tribunal or other legal setting.
I get your point, but these guys don't have anywhere near the same clout that Apple has.
Path is young (and building a service, not a device/OS) and it can be abandoned for something similar since all they're keeping is data. Once you buy a gadget, that's an investment on your part which will make a lot of people hesitant to give it up and the culture it that surrounds it.
And I wouldn't bet that Apple will be able to survive scandal after scandal and still survive unscathed. Cook is no Jobs.
Maybe not, but Apple changed their practices pretty darn quick. They now review suppliers much more closely than they did before, and Foxconn's practices have changed a bit as well. You can argue it didn't have ENOUGH effect, but you can't claim it made no difference.
The goal was not to tank apple, but to improve the working conditions at the factory floor and transparency on apple's part. Apple' supply chain is much more transparent after the noise.
On another note, our outrage/disagreement cannot be outcome based. We hope the bad publicity will change things. many times it does not.
This assumes that Path (or any company) would be foolish enough to make their intentions clear.
If a developer refused to implement a feature due to their ethics then the company would do the following:
* Move engineer to different project
* Set unrealistic goals/deadlines/expectations
* After engineer fails, voice concern about performance
* Set up performance review and improvement plan
* After causing engineer to fail a second time due to unrealistic expectations, fire them due to poor performance
Even if that engineer writes a blog post, enough has happened between his initial refusal and termination as to make conclusive proof impossible. The discussion will be a he-said-she-said affair as his former employer makes a counter-blog post explaining the engineer's poor performance.
A lawsuit is similarly out of the question as most companies have sufficient funds to cause delays in court, thereby causing you to spend all your money on attorney fees and bleeding you dry.
Yup. SOP in the food service industry is to give employees who are underperforming 4 hours per week, on the slowest shift, and just leave them there until they quit.
Honestly, if you refuse to do something on ethical grounds and then are moved around, you know what's going on. Most people aren't clueless to office politics and at that point it's your decision to blow the whistle or shut up and watch it happen in spite of your oath.
It's not like hospitals haven't contended with this exact thing for a very long time. The wills of surgeons/doctors and their hospital administrators do not always match up.
How would this be any different from the situation today, where he writes a blog post titled, "Path fired me for not spamming millions of people's phones" and the community rallies around the whistle-blower?
Arguably, the root cause of Turing’s persecution was that his privacy got invaded, and subsequently the government did not think he had a right to his private conduct.
Though admittedly, no technology was involved in the whole matter.
Also, Turing’s wartime exploits involved a breach of privacy in the service of a good cause.
Arguably, the root cause of Turing’s persecution was that his privacy got invaded, and subsequently the government did not think he had a right to his private conduct.
Actually, come to think of it, if viewed in that way, he's the perfect name for an ethics oath regarding privacy. I hadn't considered it that way.
It would be interesting to combine this with an open source license which links to the Oath, and forbids use of the code in any project or system which breaks the Oath.
For developers who have undertaken the Oath, the challenge would then be to write the best code, so that it sees widespread adoption. This might potentially make it harder for companies like Path to engage in activities which break the Oath.
>Maybe it's time to create a Hippocratic Oath for developers to publicly commit to?
This is silly. Stop trying to add grandeur to writing some code at X,Y startup/company.
People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone. Code is a way to implement an idea. Most applications exist to make money. If this a shock to you, read the user agreement before installing/upgrading, uninstall the application, or realize that in social networking, your personal data what the company uses to make a profit.
I disagree. As a computer engineer in Canada, I must swear by the Code of Ethics because what I do (or potentially don't do) can cause harm.
Ethics in computer-science-related fields are important and I think we do need a set of rules we can dogmatically follow like the Hippocratic Oath. Of course, the HO is different in that failing to follow can cause physical harm. However, the world is progressing quickly and more and more information is hosted online -- personal information.
I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
So in Canada, software engineers never cause harm to anyone? Nice to know.
>>>> I think we do need a set of rules we can dogmatically follow like the Hippocratic Oath.
So you don't actually have to employ your own brain and your own moral judgement, because somebody already did it for you and wrote this nice set of rules, that you swore by Apollo to faithfully execute, without thinking, not unlike that box of wires and silicon chips you are paid to play with? Nice arrangement, I suppose.
>>>> I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
I think you're missing the point. The oath is to remind you to use your head, your best judgement and a body of ethics and to act in the interest of the public. Sure engineers still make mistakes, but the code of ethics isn't some magical document that eliminated human error.
Also, I think you're sort of merging the HO with the Code of Ethics for engineers in Canada -- two very different documents and I suggest you give them a read. And no, no one still thinks they're swearing to Apollo.
>>>> The oath is to remind you to use your head, your best judgement and a body of ethics
Why you need an oath for that - shouldn't it be always the default behavior?
>>>> and to act in the interest of the public.
"Interest of the public" is a very dangerous thing. I can remember a lot of very bad things that were done "in the interest of the public". You can make almost anything pass as "in the interest of the public" if you want to. Murder? Millions were murdered "in the interest of the public", because they were of the wrong ethnicity, class, physical features or just in the wrong place in the wrong time. Robbery? Millions were stripped of their property and reduced to utter poverty because it was claimed it is "interest of the public" to do so. And so on, and so forth.
I would rather steer clear of anything that has "interest of the public" written on it, at least until it's very clear what is underneath. Too many things that were underneath such writing proved to be a disaster.
>>> no one still thinks they're swearing to Apollo.
Swearing to a document composed by a faceless bureaucracy is no better. If you have code of ethics, live by it, if you do not - get one. What Apollo or his modern equivalent, the almighty bureaucracy, has to do with it?
One more variation: Nina, On, and Ariely conducted a similar experiment. But, one group was asked to write down 10 books they had read in high school, and the other group was asked to try to recall and write down the 10 Commandments.
When cheating was not possible, the average score was 3.1
When cheating was possible, the book group reported a score of 4.1 (33% cheating)
When cheating was possible, the 10 Commandments group scored 3.1 (0% cheating)
And most of the subjects couldn't even recall all of the commandments! Even those who could only remember 1 or 2 commandments were nearly as honest. "This indicated that it was not the Commandments themselves that encouraged honesty, but the mere contemplation of a moral benchmark of some kind."
Perhaps we can have people sign secular statements--similar to a professional oath--to remind us of our commitment to honesty. So Ariely had students sign a statement on the answer sheet: "I understand that this study falls under the MIT honor system."
Those who signed didn't cheat. Those who didn't see the statement showed 84% cheating.
"The effect of signing a statement about an honor code is particularly amazing because MIT doesn't even have an honor code."
Interesting experiments, the question is if this persists - i.e. if you read the 10 commandments at the beginning of the semester and take the test at the end - would the difference still remain.
"So you don't actually have to employ your own brain and your own moral judgement, because somebody already did it for you and wrote this nice set of rules, that you swore by Apollo to faithfully execute, without thinking, not unlike that box of wires and silicon chips you are paid to play with? Nice arrangement, I suppose."
So I assume you never use any open source code in any of your programming projects, since you are fundamentally opposed to adopting any ideas that are not exclusively your own?
You assume wrong, this in no way follows from what I have said and I never said that I am "fundamentally opposed to adopting any ideas that are not exclusively your own". You must have by accident commented in a wrong branch.
>I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
No, it's our responsibility as decent people. I don't need to sign some online pledge to keep myself from pushing people in front of trains. If I was the sort to harm others, why would I care about some meaningless online campaign?
There's nothing to sign and it's not a campaign. You're right, it is our responsibility as decent people to uphold a certain level of moral and ethical behaviour, especially when the software we write is in control of sensitive information.
The Oath is there to remind you to act in the best interest of the user. There are no formalities and although it seems common sense to people like you and me, others might not see it so clearly.
Well, yes. But there is a reason that every profession that has tackled this problem has used a system of oaths and certification. Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers are the canonical examples.
You need something that is given and can be taken away for bad behaviour in order to change behaviour at this level. Damn human brains.
Taken away by whom and on what basis? I would dispute that you need the ability to take away other individuals' ability to lawfully write software. That ability is bound to be abused for political reasons (which is also what it looks like when people have reasonably different ethical systems and one imposes his by force).
Anyway, the issue at hand is bad corporate behavior, not bad programmers. I don't see why we need to start licking our chops about the prospect of forming a blacklist against individual programmers.
This is just a bonding/licensing arrangement, it's in use by every other profession that has this exact problem.
So go ahead and try and stop bad corporate behaviour, everyone else can use a proven system so that programmers can easily say "no" when asked to do something unethical and not be fired for it.
I'm often confused by how often programmers completely reinvent the wheel when faced with social problems. The idea of looking to other similar industries never comes up, even if the problem is exactly the same.
An engineer holds a license such that they can profess, which license is conditional to the respect of their code of ethics (and a bunch of rules). If they do not follow those conditions, their license can be revoked.
So what if they lose their license? They can still write code and do harm.
Yes, indeed. As it stands right now, the reality of the engineer's license is such that it doesn't fit very well the software world. The vast majority of companies couldn't give less of a damn whether you are licensed or not. However, it depends.
Regulations might eventually come in place to force software producers to hire only licensed engineers if the nature of their business is prone to put the public in danger. And as technology grows ever deeper into our lives, the danger that consumer apps can cause on the public is ever growing as well. For instance, breaching a user's privacy can be enough info to grant an ill-intended operator access to the user's e-mail through social engineering, from which it is then often trivial to gain access to that user's bank informations. You don't need that much imagination to figure out a scenario where a user's life can be turned to shit by some software abuse.
Given that this risk is ever growing, the possibility of a code of ethic on software business is plausible. Say in X months, the government of country Y decides that companies hoping to run a social network available on their territories must hire licensed software-engineers, and have them all sign-off any code that is presented to the public. That software engineer they'd hire would have to put their license and career in jeopardy if they were to implement some evil feature.
Before Québec's bridge, engineers didn't need a license to build infrastructure. The parallel between the current situation and the past isn't too hard to make.
> People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone.
Of course they get harmed: their time is wasted, and perhaps their concentration disturbed. This is a small harm to each victim, no doubt about it, but if you write code that makes your social-messaging application spam people then you're delivering that small harm to a large number of people. If your code wastes 10 seconds each, just once, for a million people, that's about three person-months of aggregate time you've stolen that will never come back.
It's quite true that "in social networking, your personal data what the company uses to make a profit". But if it were near-universal practice for new software engineers to swear a solemn oath not to use their powers for evil, who knows? perhaps some other business model for social networking might have had a chance to succeed.
What happens if an app for job seekers texts your boss? What if a casual hookup site texts your new girlfriend--even though you signed up a year before meeting her? What happens if your app calls an old person and they crack a hip trying to answer a phone--when everyone that knows them personally knows not to call until they're awake and their caretaker is in?
These may sound far-fetched, and we all mostly don't pretend we're as disciplined as structural engineers, but "we do it for the money lulz" is a shitty and stupid argument.
I'm okay with this. I'd rather be calculating than have my head in the sand about the business models of social networking what-have-you applications.
>What if a casual hookup site texts your new girlfriend--even though you signed up a year before meeting her?
While I don't and won't have to experience this, your imagined relationship suffers more from lack of trust and honesty than "some dumb app does some dumb, annoying thing."
>"we do it for the money lulz" is a shitty and stupid argument.
Don't Straw Man me. If my code was going to be used for something I perceive as evil, I'd leave the job.
Our industry doesn't need yet another pointless, embarrassing ethics/integrity campaign when the people writing the code don't care.
People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone.
I disagree. This case reminds me of Geni. You would put a relative's email address in to invite them, and they'd then receive a torrent of spammy "updates", until they registered to unsubscribe.
My less tech-savvy father added many relatives from his address book to Geni. Lots of hate from deranged relatives, and some less technically-inclined relatives are probably still being spammed, 6 years later-it made family gatherings awkward for a while. There are real-world, harmful consequences to this kind of scummy, unethical tactic.
This response assumes that joining all social networks is user choice. Unfortunately, we live in a world where it hurts consumers NOT to be on some networks. LinkedIn (which also has had a history of horrible spamming in the past) is an example - sure, you can choose not to be on it, but you'll probably get dinged by hiring managers because your credentials somehow seem less legitimate if not corroborated by LinkedIn.
A "Hippocratic Oath for developers" sounds like a great idea, but we vastly underestimate the number of jerkbags in the world.
People want validation. Line-level employees want praise from coworkers and bosses. Executives want praise from their peers, investors, industry, and press. Concepts like ethics, "right," or even this-is-good-for-thie-world isn't a concern when faced with "X will increase my social status and happiness with my peer brogrammers." What's X? It's anything possible, regardless of legal, right, wrong, or ethical.
A nontrivial number of companies use unethical methods (spam, false invites, false installs, phone and email address book capture, fake attractive profiles) to increase their vanity metrics. Employees see those methods as either: "this is bad, but it's sooooo good for us — look at all the lame n00bs who fall for our tricks" or "this is bad, and I'm ashamed to work here."
The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
Even the tech darlings of today used spammy methods to grow their initial user base. How do you grow your userbase to ten million when you're growing at a constant 5,000 per day? Obviously you want to "go viral." How does one just on a whim "go viral?" You can either become a meme, a social phenomenon, or spam and manipulate unsuspecting people. Spam is less work than creativity.
wow, I (like many others, obviously) have experienced many of the things described in the msdn blog article you linked to, yet never really thought critically that those things don't have to be there!
Things are going to look different to me now when I'm on a windows machine.
A lot of the things mentioned there are good reasons for a curated App Store approach. It's almost impossible to stop arbitrary programs from abusing features of the OS on which they run, unless you have control over which ban poorly behaving programs from ever reaching end users.
Alternatively, you can think of it as a good argument for open source. Take abuse of the notification area, for example: in Ubuntu this was eliminated by modifying every package in the archive. That's something a system like Windows with closed components belonging to dozens of different manufactures can't really do.
Nice post, but putting shortcuts in Quick Launch bar seems pretty standard these days and I like it as long as the installer asks. Also, he mentions the fact a programmer would have to hard code the file path ... I don't see why they couldn't write an algorithm to discover it instead.
I remember having to put my job on the line a few times for refusing to program / setup something awful.
One of the worst was when I was asked to combine all divisions email lists and send out a marketing email selling some overpriced book, this was against the Privacy Act (AU), against our privacy policy and highly unethical to boot, refused and was given a written warning.
It was a contract web development company I was working for, about ten years ago. One of our clients wanted some SEO work done, and my supervisor had recently been reading a lot about SEO. He started out reading white-hat stuff, but by this point he was delving into some black-hat research, and he essentially asked me to program a message-board spam-bot. I just told him straight up that I believed that would be unethical and I refused to do it, knowing full well that simply refusing to do assigned work could cost me job.
Thankfully, not only did this not cost me my job, it caused my supervisor to re-evaluate his own position and he decided to go back into completely white-hat SEO. And in the end, he actually thanked me for refusing to do that work.
> The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
I think it is important that we should realize this kind of mentality won't work. You might see bad people making money, but eventually it will be no good for them. Either they don't sustain, or the money is no good for them, or they can't sleep with all that money under their pillow. You will see lot of examples of this from history.
I have seen people who are ethical and right also make a lot of profits. May be not in the short term, but in the long term. The idea is, you don't go behind money, instead you do what you do best, and money will come behind you.
I am not a jerkbag yet multiple times I have put my beliefs to one side to implement something I really didn't want to do. It made me sad and demoralized for weeks. Yet the choice between sticking to values and feeding family is not a difficult one to make in the end.
This is why we got mad at the top of the Nazi regime, not the bottom. The workers just needed to feed their families, the ones at the top orchestrated the evils.
There were plenty people at the lower levels of the Nazi regime who were put in trial if they were considered to have committed crimes (e.g. concentration camp guards).
The patent language says it's "a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes." Extending this more broadly would say "a commitment to our employees that the code they write can only be used for non-spamming purposes."
The problem, of course, is that it's pretty easy to tell whether a patent is being used defensively or offensively. Defining spam (or more difficult yet, privacy) is a bit more slippery.
So should a software developer's code include armaments, or not?
If it does, it would never get mainstream acceptance; if it doesn't, but does cover the topic of this post, it will be ethically absurd.
I don't see how this is a straw man; when building a professional code, one has to choose what actions to allow or disallow, and this seems like a topic that would obviously come up. What do you think about this scenario misrepresents the idea of a developer's professional code?
This is an internal debate I've had with myself since reading Bernard William's Objections to Utilitarianism [0].
I've never had to actually face the ethical dilemma of developing weapons, but what if the development improved precision on a missile? If we can ignore the question as to whether a missile is ethical or not, developing a better guidance system for a missile will help limit collateral damage, but could increase the "comfort-level" of using the weapon for those who decide such things, therefore increasing overall death/destruction. Utilitarianism is hard, because taking all factors into account is impossible. Kind of like machine learning.
I will never scoff at someone who turns down work for ethical objections, but some people are more pragmatic than others.
Both of Williams examples are really hard to wrap your head around if you accept the situations as presented. They are similar to a Sophies Choice [1]
This is a divergence, but it seems to ignore the value that comes from propagating the meme that building armament systems is unethical by refusing to participate in it.
While the idea of an oath may be flawed, I do think it's about time some segments of the tech field showed a little less contempt towards users. I don't know how that would happen, but launching your own startup shouldn't give you carte blanche to exploit your users however you see fit.
As a programmer, I don't want a bunch of charlatans in SF to give my career an unsavoury reputation because of these antics.
if there were such an oath, programmers would write the code and the business will fill it with content..
//It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Once Congress puts a bill forward to deal with this issue, it will be the beginning of the end for this type of behavior. I'm sure Obama will get behind it as well, as it will help the computer market immensely.
"Don't be evil" has never really worked, despite best intentions, depending on your vantage point.
You don't need an official Oath or for the company to know or base their employment on such an Oath. Either way, the bottleneck is the employee drawing attention to the company doing something unethical; no Oath has to get in the way of that. There's already a sub-thread on top-secret/weapons/armaments jobs. What about political ethics? And religious? Marriage / gay rights? Porn? "Sexism?"
Engineers have this system already and have had it forever. In Canada (the one I'm familiar with) it is the P.Eng (Professional Engineer) license.
I think the system should be licensing and involve losing that license if you commit an ethics violation.
There would be unlicensed developers of course, but connecting the incentive to not do unethical things with the incentive to be part of the elite class in your profession has worked pretty damn well for Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers.
> has worked pretty damn well for Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers.
... and has pretty much screwed over the rest of society, at least in the latter two cases. The legal and medical cartels have done incredible harm to their customers over the years.
I have to say that your link about medicine is short of laughble.
Even if there was some bad "allopathy" back in the day, there is more bad eclictics and homeopathy right now. And to practice medicine you have to understand scientific method, especially falsifability.
And I also have to say that the "free market" idea isn't falsifable. "Let it to free market" rarely works.
They assume rational actors (people making decisions based on their own self interest). That's been falsified (when applied to humans).
Most variations of the efficient market hypothesis have been disproved as well, for the same reasons:
Humans have cognitive biases and other types of irrational behaviour.
But anyone linking to mises.org is probably a follower of the church of the free market. And they generally strongly disagree with the idea that humans have cognitive biases (because their faith requires it not to be true).
I'm glad someone else laughed at the pro-homeopathy / conspiracy theory around the history of snake oil salesmen content on there.
> That's untrue of some schools of economics that advocate free markets, e.g. Austrian.
I took the term "free market 'idea'" to be specifically talking about those for which it's true. That seemed to be the point, and the site linked to was Austrian. Both articles make the assumptions in question about the ability to self-regulate that assumes rational actors. So yes, my statement was not true of all schools, but it seemed like those types of Austrians were not in the scope of the discussion.
> That's an ... interesting ... claim. Care to justify it?
Subjective opinion. I read economics news and neuroscience news because it's interesting. Comment threads, especially here, frequently have two types of subjects that start the vocal libertarians arguing and proclaiming: government regulation and the phrase "humans are irrational".
This is an important sticking point. Maybe a Professional Engineering certification isn't the solution, but let's not get hung up here.
Example: P.E. certified people should have no problem creating weapons systems for a nation-state at war. Does that make it ethical? Depends on who writes the history books afterward.
Example: P.E. certified people might refuse to participate in experimental, unorthodox methods. But especially in software these often become the runaway successes.
In other words _you_ have to own _your_ personal ethics. You won't be able to point and say "I was just following orders!" The pointy-haired boss who gave the orders isn't going to be able to exonerate you of the guilt. Often he doesn't even congratulate you for "doing the right thing." Maybe he'll fire you or give you a bonus – or join you in prison! – but my point is: it's orthogonal to your personal ethics.
Ethics may sometimes appear to conflict with rapid progress. That doesn't necessarily imply an existential crisis, just a lack of forethought. So many ethical problems arise due to overflowing ignorance / lack of forethought combined with a sudden rash of malice (when it comes time to pay the piper). Ethics are a way of expressing realities about the world that conflict with the general Adam Smithian "enlightened self-interest." I view ethics as meta-enlightened self interest – like how Apple is more than just industry-leading, they carved new niches where no one thought to go.
Engineers (software engineers or otherwise) have untangled things much more complicated than this. It's only overwhelming if it blows up in your face.
Path seems like a classic case of all of the above.
Of course. The _whole point_ of _any_ ethical or moral principle is that it directs you to do things that are right even at some possible cost to yourself.
If you believe that standing up for your strongly-held beliefs will get you fired, you should look for a new job _now_. Sure, that incurs the trouble and uncertainty of a job switch, and possibly a pay cut (though perhaps less of that than you think). But if it means that you don't have to be ashamed of what you do all day --- it's generally worth it.
This may vary by province, but our provincial engineering board will not stand up for you if you get fired due to upholding your code of ethics (they even told us so in ethics class).
Furthermore, whistleblowers are often unemployed for extended periods of time, due to corporations not wanting to hire them as they could be a liability.
Computers attempted various guises of "can't we all just get along".
At one time, it was cooperative multitasking and memory management. Programs were supposed to behave themselves and get out of one anothers' way. Except that, due to bugs or malice, some didn't. We called this world "DOS" (or pre OSX Macs).
Microsoft still attempts to allow vendors to install programs whereever the hell they want, and to, pretty please, not overwrite other program's infrastructure or system-level DLLs. Yeah. Right.
In the Linux world, we've solved this problem, if done right, though distro-managed, well, distributions. Any program can be included if it meets qualifications (generally limited to licensing requirements), and a sponsor steps up. Once included, the package gets the benefits of being included in the package lists, distributed over archive mirrors, and included in bugtracking and support systems. However it's also got to play along with the requirements of Debian Policy as to how it behaves on a system.
The proper way to address the issues of app privileges is to control privileges centrally on the device and grant them to specific apps. If a user doesn't wish to give an app, say, addressbook access, then they can deny it (or feed it a bogus addressbook). The app vendor can decide what they're going to do at this point, but what they can't do is override the user's explicitly stated limits.
This is proven (and risky) way to grow. I really cannot blame them: they have to pay their rent and VCs are nervous.
This approach might burn them completely but also can get them to some significant number of users (after which they will issue an apology and pay all fines if needed).
Shitty behavior does not stop being shitty behavior because you have bills to pay. And it's not even in the "understandable under duress" area of shitty; Path isn't a person with a starving child and that dude's contact list isn't a loaf of bread.
If your company can't exist without being shitty, your company shouldn't exist.
I completely agree with you on "If your company can't exist without being shitty, your company shouldn't exist.". However, here in VC-stanm the behavior like this is considered "hacking the growth" and something which is not considered a bad thing. So unfortunately, you cannot play the game here (ok, you can play but no big money will bet on you) if you not ready to do things like this.
I'm all for the moral high ground, but it becomes a lot less simple when "pressured" means something like a combination of "sole breadwinner" and "ethical choice." Reality doesn't bend to our idealism, and businesses are grounded solely in reality (often to our detriment).
Definitely not. I'm saying it's never "right" in a moral/ethical sense, but when you're put in certain (fairly common) positions, the moral high ground is not a feasible option for most people. It comes down to whether you consider stability for those who depend on you more or less important than doing or refusing to do something based on whether you consider it right or wrong... that's something that's easy to judge until you're in such a position.
This sounds patronizing. As adults, you make your choice and face the consequences. That you may have dependents does not reduce your moral responsibility one bit.
Clearly you don't know how it feels to actually have "dependents" or what that responsibility entails. This will sound patronizing, but it's absolutely valid: Come back and comment on this in 10 to 20 years. At that point you might have the perspective you clearly lack now.
[edit]To be clear: I do not have dependents, but I also don't have an employer (who isn't me), and I do have people that depend on me. What I also have is a lot of experience in a lot of situations that are very much "gray" in terms of what less-experienced people seem to consider moral/ethical absolutes, which simply do not exist. That last part is what you don't understand but are likely to figure out as life teaches you the things your parents and teachers would like to but simply can't.[/edit]
It sounds patronizing because it is. It sounds silly because it's that, too.
Doing the right thing is sometimes difficult. That's not an excuse to do the wrong thing. Indiscriminately spamming hundreds of contacts is always the wrong thing.
This isn't the hypothetical where you're stealing a loaf of bread from the market to feed your starving family. I certainly respect that taking the moral high ground isn't always easy and that some people are going to be in situations where it is more difficult for them to do so than for others.
But the standard for acting like an asshole has to be greater than simple expediency. The necessity of breaking the social contract has to be roughly proportional to the community inconvenience; that's why firemen get to use the siren and everyone is supposed to yield when they are headed to, well, fight a fire, but I don't get to use one when I'm headed to the grocery store.
If I bang on a stranger's door at 6am because their house is on fire and I'm trying to warn them, then that's great, because the "don't harass strangers at six in the freaking morning" social norm is less important than the "OMG THE FLAMES THEY BURN!" social norm. In contrast, if I bang on someone's door at 6am trying to sell Amway products, then I'm an asshole. Finally, If I bang on someone's door at 6am, insist that their buddy, whose name I found by going through the trash, has photos to share with them, and only later reveal that there never were any photos, then I'm an unbelievable jackass.
Unfortunately, your analogy is excessively dramatic and misses the reality of the situation. It's easy to create surreal situations in which absolute visions of your own morals apply. Sorry, but you just don't get it.
Apologies for trying to make a point. If anything, my analogy seems pretty much on point, as it barely changes the reality around the events here as described:
banging on door <=> text/phone call, which likely causes an audible alert
stranger <=> contact/acquaintance/vendor/client/boss/relative/lover/ex-lover/dentist of a new user
6am <=> 6am
their buddy <=> their contact
the trash <=> a new user's cell phone contacts
has photos to share <=> has photos to share
there never were any photos <=> there never were any photos
unbelievable jackass <=> unbelievable jackass
Seems close enough.
But my real question for you is which is it? Did a developer/Path act unethically, but you believe those actions are justified because people have families they need to care for? Or do you believe that Path/the developers did nothing wrong and I'm just applying my own morals to the situation? One or the other is a legitimate position to take (though I may disagree with your view), but you can't have both.
It doesn't, but it might mean we need to look into how the pressure is being applied.
We can bitch at Path all day, but there exists strong incentive to do this, and people who don't do this will have unilaterally disarmed and be at a disadvantage. We need to encourage the first group to not do this, and encourage the second group to keep it up and not feel like suckers for respecting their users.
I'm OK with that game not being played. That spam-calling random people at 6AM is not an immediate "get the fuck out of my office" is probably a pretty good indication that something is deeply rotten in, as you put it, "VC-stan."
But you can get on TechCrunch, so it's gotta be okay, right? :(
And we also need to understand that all these social networks are in business of spamming people ("growing the network"). Hey I remember back in 2006 (maybe 2005?) Facebook invited all my all my Gmail contacts to Facebook (including people who interviewed me ...).
That is the key of their existence, so I'm not sure how anybody in right mind can expect anything else. Maybe I'm too old and see these things as they are...
I think a better solution is to make fines exponential (for repeated reasons), for e.g. 1st time $10, 2nd time $100, third time $1000 dollars and so on.
Fines are meant to discourage behaviour found unacceptable by society[0]. That obviously fails to work if the net outcome of a ‘discouraged’ action is still positive even after taking into account the fine (and compensation for damage, if any).
So, really, the (first) fine was not high enough. For a very similar reason, non-trivial fines[1] are usually given as a percentage of turnover or daily fines.
[0] Note that jail time also serves to rehabilitate the offender in case of serious crimes. That obviously doesn’t really work with companies, and unfortunately, carelessness with other people’s data is not considered a serious crime in many places.
Yeah, that's why I think exponential grow in fines for repeated offenses by a company is a good idea, it will eventually be net negative for the company so they will stop doing it.
Because you can't know the net positive in advance; is way too dependent of the context and that includes the size of the company.
It also discourages the searching of flaws in the system because even if you get away with it once (net-positive) you know the next time the fine will make unviable.
BTW this is similar to how already the civil justice system works in many countries, where after repeated minor offenses you go to jail.
Would it also be okay to murder people in order to pay your rent and your backers are nervous? What about just hitting them over the head? What about just threatening to hit them?
Ethical justification isn't easy, but it's also not this hard. The entire point of being ethical is that you might lose out as a result of being ethical. If you opt to discard ethics in order to get ahead, you are being unethical. That is what it means to be unethical.
Facebook does that exact thing by the way - my boss came back from a week of vacation and wondered how I found him on Facebook. Facebook had sent each one of us in the office a link, that he didn't know about. Anytime you send email as a user - it needs to be very explicit.
There's no way to sue, but I suppose the FTC could take action and fine.
They will claim it's a "bug"... albeit one of those "viral bugs" that seems to lead to topping the App Store download charts. These tactics make me think there's no such thing as organic growth within the app stores.
You can sue for anything; just not always successfully. That said ...
This appears to be trespass which I think is a tort (entering a part of property, the phone, that was off limits and without consent). You can sue for that.
It's also in the same respect contrary to the UK Computer Misuse Act (crime) AFAICT [story appears to be in the UK, or is it just UK entries in the addressbook]. That would probably hinge on the consent to access the particular files duplicated.
Then there's database rights (tort?), a sort of copyright for databases. [Copyright wouldn't apply as it's not a creative work].
Harassment (tort I think) and infringement of the right to a private life as enshrined in the ECHR (crime) seem to be causes to object as well.
As the calls were business motivated then failure to check against a telephone cold-call blacklist could also generate extra fines.
How about another detail — the fact that – according do another comment here, the only one that seems to actually have looked at how the app behaves before jumping the gun – the app tells you it's going to invite everyone on first launch and you need to tell it not to?
"The Privacy Act gives you the right to make a complaint if you believe an Australian or ACT government agency, or a private sector organisation covered by the Act, has mishandled your personal information contained in a record."
Well, I don't think we should look for malice when is just incompetence.
LinkedIn keeps asking me to share my mail user/password so I can connect with more people, and says that X and many others already did it. I can't tell about others, but X is my wife and I'm certain she didn't do it.
So well, as I said I think that this is just a matter of incompetence (ie. automated message gone wrong).
See, I am not convinced that it was an innocent "automated mistake". This is equivalent to the anecdotal old excuse one always hears from the government officials: "the computer did it". When some spamming process like this is automated, all it means is that it is being inflicted on lots of people and most likely deliberately, so automation is not something that can be accepted as an excuse, on the contrary, it is an aggravating circumstance.
I incline towards the opinion that these sharks do it quite deliberately. They just don't care how many people they embarrass and annoy, as long as some of those tech-innocent grannies and plumbers join up and thus put figures on their business projection sheets that get these sharks closer to cashing in big on an FB style IPO.
Reminds me of the emails Facebook sends me telling me that I've missed important notifications when I don't log in for a while. I log in, and there are no notifications waiting.
And the messages Facebook sends me telling me about an event and letting me know that one of my friends is a guest, when they've been invited but haven't actually confirmed.
Glad i just deleted Path long time ago. I did it because many reasons, the first one is transfer my entire life to a new place, then find out it can close, sell to another company I don't like. So the fear of wasting resources and time to setup my life in there made me deny this app. The second reason was an old episode with contact data, so I thought they shall make many other "mistakes" in the future. So after this one I feel better I didn't follow this path. Facebook is also dead on my life, I just check it for family messages. Google+ all the way.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] thread(You can also contact your phone company and ask them to please remove this "feature" - but usually you have to be subjected to it before you know the phone company even does this!)
I'll make sure to never install Path
There are some abuses that can't be solved by an apology.
Not installing Path is not a solution here. You gotta look critically at the permissions an app uses and their terms of service (at least skip to the privacy related issues, though they usually try to hide and obfuscate them). If there is something you don't entirely trust, wonder why you really need that app. Perhaps it's an improvement for your life, but can't you really live without? You've gone without that app for the past how many years? Is it worth giving up your phone book and all sdcard contents?
Here's what I would like: for Android to allow me to deny or ask for a confirmation for each permission of these.
Path seems to be taking especially egregious steps. All the UI polish in the world can't hide shady business practices.
As it stands, $800k is a line item equal to only 2% of the money Path has raised. As such, I doubt that anybody who invested in it cares or views this as anything other than a triviality that a few nerds will care about.
Edit: Here's when they flubbed a year ago.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-57373474-250/path-ceo-we-a...
Edit2: Er... apparently, I suffered a seizure of some sort (and an aneurism and a stroke simultaneously). Reworded.
"... Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path. ..."
So they want you to feel in control.
I get the feeling that either those in charge are hopelessly detached from society to see how privacy is perceived by the rest of us (like Zuckerberg) or there's little to no vetting when it comes to implementation decisions.
That non-apology is corporate communications at its most typical.
More here: http://terribleapologies.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology#Examples and http://jezebel.com/sorry-not-sorry-how-to-non-apologize-5993...
If you aren't Captain Picard, you're not engaging anything. Shut up and talk human, folks.
They are betting that they become so big that these shenanigans don't matter later on.
It's a Catch-22 of ethical misconduct!
I'm not sure the shenanigans won't come back to haunt them. Less trendy apps have been booted from Apple's App Store for a lot less.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
This does not seem like the most likely scenario to me.
Recently fined by the FTC: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2026985/ftc-fines-maker-of-pa...
If Path grows, I hope they just die (two strikes is enough for me!) more and more people will look under the hood.
On top of all of that, why wouldn't the phone provide a setting to restrict all personal/identifying information from being accessed by the app?
They can change later and spam your list or use it for some other purpose. You can shame them publicly if you find it out. But then, it's already too late by that time.
This is my personal favorite app permission that you can request: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...
CALLING A FREAKING LANDLINE?!? DIE PATH
Contact them via their Desk service portal here http://service.path.com/customer/portal/emails/new and ask them to remove your data after deactivating.
Not deleting your content, though. I hate that.
“Deactivating your account will remove your content from Path.”
The ‘Path’ in the sentence refers to the social network, not the company’s servers.
This privacy policy is a joke. It basically says "we can do anything we like with your data".
Under the "What Information Do We Share With Third Parties?" section there are some classic deceptions. This one is great (as in evil genius):
>with certain social networking services, if you allow such sharing through our services; //
Not consent, allow. As in if you don't actively prevent it we'll do it.
>with service providers who are working with us in connection with the operation of our site or our services //
We'll sell you out to anyone who we can describe as "working with us".
>"in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing or acquisition, or in any other situation where personal information may be disclosed or transferred as one of our business assets."
So when doing business-y stuff, blah, blah oh yeah and any time we want to use your info as a business asset. They're covering themselves, again, to sell all data to anyone who'll buy it.
Why? Having worked on a semi social app last year, deleting a user and all their content was a huge undertaking. Marking them and their content as deleted was simple and had the exact same effect--user and content never get returned from DB queries. Guess which one we implemented?
I guess I'm trying to say sites don't (always) do the deactivate thing because of some nefarious scheme to steal your content/identity at a later date. Sometimes it's just a technical call (or lazy programmers, depending on your point of view).
Anyone got a mirror?
So, google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
There's annoying spam, and then there's straight-out-lying spam -- the "x has sent you a message, you need to create an account to view it" type.
Just curious, is there a way to sue/fine a company like this for false advertising, essentially?
Another app doing similar spamming is Circle: http://discovercircle.com - surprised no one talked about that...
(your winnings, sir.)
Still the same practice spammers use, but very different from "covertly uploading my contacts data and texting everyone without telling me".
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/how-lawsuit-again...
> The case originated with two lawsuits claiming that Classmates.com had sent out millions of deceptive e-mails telling users that an old friend was trying to contact them, and had viewed their profile or signed their "guestbook." For the great majority, that wasn't true; no one at all had shown an interest in their profile. About 60 million users were contacted, and about 3 million actually took the bait, paying between $10 and $40 to Classmates.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/classmatescom-set...
Maybe it's time to create a Hippocratic Oath for developers to publicly commit to?
A future Path developer could then refuse to implement an unethical "feature" by pointing out that the company had hired them with the full knowledge that the oath had been undertaken.
I don't think the company would pink slip the developer, as they would probably want to avoid any attention being drawn to the unethical "feature" in a tribunal or other legal setting.
Path is young (and building a service, not a device/OS) and it can be abandoned for something similar since all they're keeping is data. Once you buy a gadget, that's an investment on your part which will make a lot of people hesitant to give it up and the culture it that surrounds it.
And I wouldn't bet that Apple will be able to survive scandal after scandal and still survive unscathed. Cook is no Jobs.
If a developer refused to implement a feature due to their ethics then the company would do the following:
* Move engineer to different project
* Set unrealistic goals/deadlines/expectations
* After engineer fails, voice concern about performance
* Set up performance review and improvement plan
* After causing engineer to fail a second time due to unrealistic expectations, fire them due to poor performance
Even if that engineer writes a blog post, enough has happened between his initial refusal and termination as to make conclusive proof impossible. The discussion will be a he-said-she-said affair as his former employer makes a counter-blog post explaining the engineer's poor performance.
A lawsuit is similarly out of the question as most companies have sufficient funds to cause delays in court, thereby causing you to spend all your money on attorney fees and bleeding you dry.
It's not like hospitals haven't contended with this exact thing for a very long time. The wills of surgeons/doctors and their hospital administrators do not always match up.
"The Turing Oath" is on Github (https://github.com/maxmackie/Turing-Oath/blob/master/README....) and I recommend people contribute and we grow this to become something people recognize.
But I'm not sure if Turing, who is not well known for having had anything to do with privacy is the right person for this oath.
Though admittedly, no technology was involved in the whole matter.
Also, Turing’s wartime exploits involved a breach of privacy in the service of a good cause.
Actually, come to think of it, if viewed in that way, he's the perfect name for an ethics oath regarding privacy. I hadn't considered it that way.
For developers who have undertaken the Oath, the challenge would then be to write the best code, so that it sees widespread adoption. This might potentially make it harder for companies like Path to engage in activities which break the Oath.
This is silly. Stop trying to add grandeur to writing some code at X,Y startup/company.
People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone. Code is a way to implement an idea. Most applications exist to make money. If this a shock to you, read the user agreement before installing/upgrading, uninstall the application, or realize that in social networking, your personal data what the company uses to make a profit.
Ethics in computer-science-related fields are important and I think we do need a set of rules we can dogmatically follow like the Hippocratic Oath. Of course, the HO is different in that failing to follow can cause physical harm. However, the world is progressing quickly and more and more information is hosted online -- personal information.
I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
Seriously. I hope that you'll see this in time!
>>>> I think we do need a set of rules we can dogmatically follow like the Hippocratic Oath.
So you don't actually have to employ your own brain and your own moral judgement, because somebody already did it for you and wrote this nice set of rules, that you swore by Apollo to faithfully execute, without thinking, not unlike that box of wires and silicon chips you are paid to play with? Nice arrangement, I suppose.
>>>> I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
And you need to sign an explicit oath to do that?
Also, I think you're sort of merging the HO with the Code of Ethics for engineers in Canada -- two very different documents and I suggest you give them a read. And no, no one still thinks they're swearing to Apollo.
Why you need an oath for that - shouldn't it be always the default behavior?
>>>> and to act in the interest of the public.
"Interest of the public" is a very dangerous thing. I can remember a lot of very bad things that were done "in the interest of the public". You can make almost anything pass as "in the interest of the public" if you want to. Murder? Millions were murdered "in the interest of the public", because they were of the wrong ethnicity, class, physical features or just in the wrong place in the wrong time. Robbery? Millions were stripped of their property and reduced to utter poverty because it was claimed it is "interest of the public" to do so. And so on, and so forth.
I would rather steer clear of anything that has "interest of the public" written on it, at least until it's very clear what is underneath. Too many things that were underneath such writing proved to be a disaster.
>>> no one still thinks they're swearing to Apollo.
Swearing to a document composed by a faceless bureaucracy is no better. If you have code of ethics, live by it, if you do not - get one. What Apollo or his modern equivalent, the almighty bureaucracy, has to do with it?
bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%20Irrational
One more variation: Nina, On, and Ariely conducted a similar experiment. But, one group was asked to write down 10 books they had read in high school, and the other group was asked to try to recall and write down the 10 Commandments. When cheating was not possible, the average score was 3.1 When cheating was possible, the book group reported a score of 4.1 (33% cheating) When cheating was possible, the 10 Commandments group scored 3.1 (0% cheating) And most of the subjects couldn't even recall all of the commandments! Even those who could only remember 1 or 2 commandments were nearly as honest. "This indicated that it was not the Commandments themselves that encouraged honesty, but the mere contemplation of a moral benchmark of some kind." Perhaps we can have people sign secular statements--similar to a professional oath--to remind us of our commitment to honesty. So Ariely had students sign a statement on the answer sheet: "I understand that this study falls under the MIT honor system." Those who signed didn't cheat. Those who didn't see the statement showed 84% cheating. "The effect of signing a statement about an honor code is particularly amazing because MIT doesn't even have an honor code."
So I assume you never use any open source code in any of your programming projects, since you are fundamentally opposed to adopting any ideas that are not exclusively your own?
No, it's our responsibility as decent people. I don't need to sign some online pledge to keep myself from pushing people in front of trains. If I was the sort to harm others, why would I care about some meaningless online campaign?
The Oath is there to remind you to act in the best interest of the user. There are no formalities and although it seems common sense to people like you and me, others might not see it so clearly.
Neither do doctors really need the Oath of Hippocrates to stop themselves from harming people.
Well, yes. But there is a reason that every profession that has tackled this problem has used a system of oaths and certification. Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers are the canonical examples.
You need something that is given and can be taken away for bad behaviour in order to change behaviour at this level. Damn human brains.
Anyway, the issue at hand is bad corporate behavior, not bad programmers. I don't see why we need to start licking our chops about the prospect of forming a blacklist against individual programmers.
So go ahead and try and stop bad corporate behaviour, everyone else can use a proven system so that programmers can easily say "no" when asked to do something unethical and not be fired for it.
I'm often confused by how often programmers completely reinvent the wheel when faced with social problems. The idea of looking to other similar industries never comes up, even if the problem is exactly the same.
So what if they lose their license? They can still write code and do harm.
Yes, indeed. As it stands right now, the reality of the engineer's license is such that it doesn't fit very well the software world. The vast majority of companies couldn't give less of a damn whether you are licensed or not. However, it depends.
Regulations might eventually come in place to force software producers to hire only licensed engineers if the nature of their business is prone to put the public in danger. And as technology grows ever deeper into our lives, the danger that consumer apps can cause on the public is ever growing as well. For instance, breaching a user's privacy can be enough info to grant an ill-intended operator access to the user's e-mail through social engineering, from which it is then often trivial to gain access to that user's bank informations. You don't need that much imagination to figure out a scenario where a user's life can be turned to shit by some software abuse.
Given that this risk is ever growing, the possibility of a code of ethic on software business is plausible. Say in X months, the government of country Y decides that companies hoping to run a social network available on their territories must hire licensed software-engineers, and have them all sign-off any code that is presented to the public. That software engineer they'd hire would have to put their license and career in jeopardy if they were to implement some evil feature.
Before Québec's bridge, engineers didn't need a license to build infrastructure. The parallel between the current situation and the past isn't too hard to make.
Of course they get harmed: their time is wasted, and perhaps their concentration disturbed. This is a small harm to each victim, no doubt about it, but if you write code that makes your social-messaging application spam people then you're delivering that small harm to a large number of people. If your code wastes 10 seconds each, just once, for a million people, that's about three person-months of aggregate time you've stolen that will never come back.
It's quite true that "in social networking, your personal data what the company uses to make a profit". But if it were near-universal practice for new software engineers to swear a solemn oath not to use their powers for evil, who knows? perhaps some other business model for social networking might have had a chance to succeed.
I'm not justifying either approach, by the way, just observing what I regard as a strange disconnect.
What happens if an app for job seekers texts your boss? What if a casual hookup site texts your new girlfriend--even though you signed up a year before meeting her? What happens if your app calls an old person and they crack a hip trying to answer a phone--when everyone that knows them personally knows not to call until they're awake and their caretaker is in?
These may sound far-fetched, and we all mostly don't pretend we're as disciplined as structural engineers, but "we do it for the money lulz" is a shitty and stupid argument.
I'm okay with this. I'd rather be calculating than have my head in the sand about the business models of social networking what-have-you applications.
>What if a casual hookup site texts your new girlfriend--even though you signed up a year before meeting her?
While I don't and won't have to experience this, your imagined relationship suffers more from lack of trust and honesty than "some dumb app does some dumb, annoying thing."
>"we do it for the money lulz" is a shitty and stupid argument.
Don't Straw Man me. If my code was going to be used for something I perceive as evil, I'd leave the job.
Our industry doesn't need yet another pointless, embarrassing ethics/integrity campaign when the people writing the code don't care.
When was the last one?
I disagree. This case reminds me of Geni. You would put a relative's email address in to invite them, and they'd then receive a torrent of spammy "updates", until they registered to unsubscribe.
My less tech-savvy father added many relatives from his address book to Geni. Lots of hate from deranged relatives, and some less technically-inclined relatives are probably still being spammed, 6 years later-it made family gatherings awkward for a while. There are real-world, harmful consequences to this kind of scummy, unethical tactic.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/8284...
http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
People want validation. Line-level employees want praise from coworkers and bosses. Executives want praise from their peers, investors, industry, and press. Concepts like ethics, "right," or even this-is-good-for-thie-world isn't a concern when faced with "X will increase my social status and happiness with my peer brogrammers." What's X? It's anything possible, regardless of legal, right, wrong, or ethical.
A nontrivial number of companies use unethical methods (spam, false invites, false installs, phone and email address book capture, fake attractive profiles) to increase their vanity metrics. Employees see those methods as either: "this is bad, but it's sooooo good for us — look at all the lame n00bs who fall for our tricks" or "this is bad, and I'm ashamed to work here."
The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
Even the tech darlings of today used spammy methods to grow their initial user base. How do you grow your userbase to ten million when you're growing at a constant 5,000 per day? Obviously you want to "go viral." How does one just on a whim "go viral?" You can either become a meme, a social phenomenon, or spam and manipulate unsuspecting people. Spam is less work than creativity.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/92244...
I often find myself saying, "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature."
"That feature" is something aggressively user-hostile,...
Things are going to look different to me now when I'm on a windows machine.
I remember having to put my job on the line a few times for refusing to program / setup something awful.
One of the worst was when I was asked to combine all divisions email lists and send out a marketing email selling some overpriced book, this was against the Privacy Act (AU), against our privacy policy and highly unethical to boot, refused and was given a written warning.
It was a contract web development company I was working for, about ten years ago. One of our clients wanted some SEO work done, and my supervisor had recently been reading a lot about SEO. He started out reading white-hat stuff, but by this point he was delving into some black-hat research, and he essentially asked me to program a message-board spam-bot. I just told him straight up that I believed that would be unethical and I refused to do it, knowing full well that simply refusing to do assigned work could cost me job.
Thankfully, not only did this not cost me my job, it caused my supervisor to re-evaluate his own position and he decided to go back into completely white-hat SEO. And in the end, he actually thanked me for refusing to do that work.
I feel like lucked out on that one.
I think it is important that we should realize this kind of mentality won't work. You might see bad people making money, but eventually it will be no good for them. Either they don't sustain, or the money is no good for them, or they can't sleep with all that money under their pillow. You will see lot of examples of this from history.
I have seen people who are ethical and right also make a lot of profits. May be not in the short term, but in the long term. The idea is, you don't go behind money, instead you do what you do best, and money will come behind you.
The patent language says it's "a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes." Extending this more broadly would say "a commitment to our employees that the code they write can only be used for non-spamming purposes."
The problem, of course, is that it's pretty easy to tell whether a patent is being used defensively or offensively. Defining spam (or more difficult yet, privacy) is a bit more slippery.
> Who would knowingly submit themselves to a doctor, knowing that they might give you a secondary, curable disease, just to ensure they got paid?
FTFY
What about software for missile guidance? Is that okay by this oath?
Or do we as a community value not texting people at 6AM more than we value not killing people?
If it does, it would never get mainstream acceptance; if it doesn't, but does cover the topic of this post, it will be ethically absurd.
I don't see how this is a straw man; when building a professional code, one has to choose what actions to allow or disallow, and this seems like a topic that would obviously come up. What do you think about this scenario misrepresents the idea of a developer's professional code?
I've never had to actually face the ethical dilemma of developing weapons, but what if the development improved precision on a missile? If we can ignore the question as to whether a missile is ethical or not, developing a better guidance system for a missile will help limit collateral damage, but could increase the "comfort-level" of using the weapon for those who decide such things, therefore increasing overall death/destruction. Utilitarianism is hard, because taking all factors into account is impossible. Kind of like machine learning.
I will never scoff at someone who turns down work for ethical objections, but some people are more pragmatic than others.
Both of Williams examples are really hard to wrap your head around if you accept the situations as presented. They are similar to a Sophies Choice [1]
[0]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/#Day [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie%27s_Choice_(novel)
As a programmer, I don't want a bunch of charlatans in SF to give my career an unsavoury reputation because of these antics.
Some folk tried to create a pacifist version of the GPL[1].
Others are using the RMPL (RobotGroup-Multiplo-Pacifist-License)[2] - basically a MIT license, but with a restriction that bans military projects.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/08/7511/
[2] http://multiplo.com.ar/soft/Mbq/Minibloq.Lic.v1.0.en.pdf
I generally agree with this, which is why I find the idea of a "developer's code" somewhat ridiculous.
//It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/05/your-favorite-progr...
We need them to change their ways, not disappear.
Once Congress puts a bill forward to deal with this issue, it will be the beginning of the end for this type of behavior. I'm sure Obama will get behind it as well, as it will help the computer market immensely.
You don't need an official Oath or for the company to know or base their employment on such an Oath. Either way, the bottleneck is the employee drawing attention to the company doing something unethical; no Oath has to get in the way of that. There's already a sub-thread on top-secret/weapons/armaments jobs. What about political ethics? And religious? Marriage / gay rights? Porn? "Sexism?"
I think the system should be licensing and involve losing that license if you commit an ethics violation.
There would be unlicensed developers of course, but connecting the incentive to not do unethical things with the incentive to be part of the elite class in your profession has worked pretty damn well for Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers.
... and has pretty much screwed over the rest of society, at least in the latter two cases. The legal and medical cartels have done incredible harm to their customers over the years.
See http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=51 (law) and http://mises.org/daily/4276 (medicine) for details.
Even if there was some bad "allopathy" back in the day, there is more bad eclictics and homeopathy right now. And to practice medicine you have to understand scientific method, especially falsifability.
And I also have to say that the "free market" idea isn't falsifable. "Let it to free market" rarely works.
They assume rational actors (people making decisions based on their own self interest). That's been falsified (when applied to humans).
Most variations of the efficient market hypothesis have been disproved as well, for the same reasons:
Humans have cognitive biases and other types of irrational behaviour.
But anyone linking to mises.org is probably a follower of the church of the free market. And they generally strongly disagree with the idea that humans have cognitive biases (because their faith requires it not to be true).
I'm glad someone else laughed at the pro-homeopathy / conspiracy theory around the history of snake oil salesmen content on there.
> on their own self interest).
That's untrue of some schools of economics that advocate free markets, e.g. Austrian.
> But anyone linking to mises.org is probably a follower of
> the church of the free market. And they generally
> strongly disagree with the idea that humans have
> cognitive biases (because their faith requires it not to
> be true).
That's an ... interesting ... claim. Care to justify it?
I took the term "free market 'idea'" to be specifically talking about those for which it's true. That seemed to be the point, and the site linked to was Austrian. Both articles make the assumptions in question about the ability to self-regulate that assumes rational actors. So yes, my statement was not true of all schools, but it seemed like those types of Austrians were not in the scope of the discussion.
> That's an ... interesting ... claim. Care to justify it?
Subjective opinion. I read economics news and neuroscience news because it's interesting. Comment threads, especially here, frequently have two types of subjects that start the vocal libertarians arguing and proclaiming: government regulation and the phrase "humans are irrational".
Example: P.E. certified people should have no problem creating weapons systems for a nation-state at war. Does that make it ethical? Depends on who writes the history books afterward.
Example: P.E. certified people might refuse to participate in experimental, unorthodox methods. But especially in software these often become the runaway successes.
In other words _you_ have to own _your_ personal ethics. You won't be able to point and say "I was just following orders!" The pointy-haired boss who gave the orders isn't going to be able to exonerate you of the guilt. Often he doesn't even congratulate you for "doing the right thing." Maybe he'll fire you or give you a bonus – or join you in prison! – but my point is: it's orthogonal to your personal ethics.
Ethics may sometimes appear to conflict with rapid progress. That doesn't necessarily imply an existential crisis, just a lack of forethought. So many ethical problems arise due to overflowing ignorance / lack of forethought combined with a sudden rash of malice (when it comes time to pay the piper). Ethics are a way of expressing realities about the world that conflict with the general Adam Smithian "enlightened self-interest." I view ethics as meta-enlightened self interest – like how Apple is more than just industry-leading, they carved new niches where no one thought to go.
Engineers (software engineers or otherwise) have untangled things much more complicated than this. It's only overwhelming if it blows up in your face.
Path seems like a classic case of all of the above.
If you believe that standing up for your strongly-held beliefs will get you fired, you should look for a new job _now_. Sure, that incurs the trouble and uncertainty of a job switch, and possibly a pay cut (though perhaps less of that than you think). But if it means that you don't have to be ashamed of what you do all day --- it's generally worth it.
Furthermore, whistleblowers are often unemployed for extended periods of time, due to corporations not wanting to hire them as they could be a liability.
At one time, it was cooperative multitasking and memory management. Programs were supposed to behave themselves and get out of one anothers' way. Except that, due to bugs or malice, some didn't. We called this world "DOS" (or pre OSX Macs).
Microsoft still attempts to allow vendors to install programs whereever the hell they want, and to, pretty please, not overwrite other program's infrastructure or system-level DLLs. Yeah. Right.
In the Linux world, we've solved this problem, if done right, though distro-managed, well, distributions. Any program can be included if it meets qualifications (generally limited to licensing requirements), and a sponsor steps up. Once included, the package gets the benefits of being included in the package lists, distributed over archive mirrors, and included in bugtracking and support systems. However it's also got to play along with the requirements of Debian Policy as to how it behaves on a system.
The proper way to address the issues of app privileges is to control privileges centrally on the device and grant them to specific apps. If a user doesn't wish to give an app, say, addressbook access, then they can deny it (or feed it a bogus addressbook). The app vendor can decide what they're going to do at this point, but what they can't do is override the user's explicitly stated limits.
Perhaps the guy checked a box that said "Please notify all of my contacts via text message".
Then all the messages went into queue that was delayed a bit.
Then the phone companies converted text messages to voice calls.
This approach might burn them completely but also can get them to some significant number of users (after which they will issue an apology and pay all fines if needed).
Shitty behavior does not stop being shitty behavior because you have bills to pay. And it's not even in the "understandable under duress" area of shitty; Path isn't a person with a starving child and that dude's contact list isn't a loaf of bread.
If your company can't exist without being shitty, your company shouldn't exist.
I can't figure out what you mean by this. Are you saying that this behavior is only alright when you need the money?
[edit]To be clear: I do not have dependents, but I also don't have an employer (who isn't me), and I do have people that depend on me. What I also have is a lot of experience in a lot of situations that are very much "gray" in terms of what less-experienced people seem to consider moral/ethical absolutes, which simply do not exist. That last part is what you don't understand but are likely to figure out as life teaches you the things your parents and teachers would like to but simply can't.[/edit]
Doing the right thing is sometimes difficult. That's not an excuse to do the wrong thing. Indiscriminately spamming hundreds of contacts is always the wrong thing.
But the standard for acting like an asshole has to be greater than simple expediency. The necessity of breaking the social contract has to be roughly proportional to the community inconvenience; that's why firemen get to use the siren and everyone is supposed to yield when they are headed to, well, fight a fire, but I don't get to use one when I'm headed to the grocery store.
If I bang on a stranger's door at 6am because their house is on fire and I'm trying to warn them, then that's great, because the "don't harass strangers at six in the freaking morning" social norm is less important than the "OMG THE FLAMES THEY BURN!" social norm. In contrast, if I bang on someone's door at 6am trying to sell Amway products, then I'm an asshole. Finally, If I bang on someone's door at 6am, insist that their buddy, whose name I found by going through the trash, has photos to share with them, and only later reveal that there never were any photos, then I'm an unbelievable jackass.
banging on door <=> text/phone call, which likely causes an audible alert stranger <=> contact/acquaintance/vendor/client/boss/relative/lover/ex-lover/dentist of a new user 6am <=> 6am their buddy <=> their contact the trash <=> a new user's cell phone contacts has photos to share <=> has photos to share there never were any photos <=> there never were any photos unbelievable jackass <=> unbelievable jackass
Seems close enough.
But my real question for you is which is it? Did a developer/Path act unethically, but you believe those actions are justified because people have families they need to care for? Or do you believe that Path/the developers did nothing wrong and I'm just applying my own morals to the situation? One or the other is a legitimate position to take (though I may disagree with your view), but you can't have both.
We can bitch at Path all day, but there exists strong incentive to do this, and people who don't do this will have unilaterally disarmed and be at a disadvantage. We need to encourage the first group to not do this, and encourage the second group to keep it up and not feel like suckers for respecting their users.
But you can get on TechCrunch, so it's gotta be okay, right? :(
[0] Note that jail time also serves to rehabilitate the offender in case of serious crimes. That obviously doesn’t really work with companies, and unfortunately, carelessness with other people’s data is not considered a serious crime in many places.
[1] Basically anything above a parking ticket.
It also discourages the searching of flaws in the system because even if you get away with it once (net-positive) you know the next time the fine will make unviable.
BTW this is similar to how already the civil justice system works in many countries, where after repeated minor offenses you go to jail.
Ethical justification isn't easy, but it's also not this hard. The entire point of being ethical is that you might lose out as a result of being ethical. If you opt to discard ethics in order to get ahead, you are being unethical. That is what it means to be unethical.
This. Is. Unethical.
UPDATE: That appears to be related to collecting info on minors. Looks like they need to be fined again for this.
They will claim it's a "bug"... albeit one of those "viral bugs" that seems to lead to topping the App Store download charts. These tactics make me think there's no such thing as organic growth within the app stores.
You can sue for anything; just not always successfully. That said ...
This appears to be trespass which I think is a tort (entering a part of property, the phone, that was off limits and without consent). You can sue for that.
It's also in the same respect contrary to the UK Computer Misuse Act (crime) AFAICT [story appears to be in the UK, or is it just UK entries in the addressbook]. That would probably hinge on the consent to access the particular files duplicated.
Then there's database rights (tort?), a sort of copyright for databases. [Copyright wouldn't apply as it's not a creative work].
Harassment (tort I think) and infringement of the right to a private life as enshrined in the ECHR (crime) seem to be causes to object as well.
As the calls were business motivated then failure to check against a telephone cold-call blacklist could also generate extra fines.
Seems there's much that could be sued for.
Still bad, but quite a different perspective.
Yes. It's illegal to use someone else's likeness for advertising without their permission.
http://www.privacy.gov.au/complaints/what
LinkedIn keeps asking me to share my mail user/password so I can connect with more people, and says that X and many others already did it. I can't tell about others, but X is my wife and I'm certain she didn't do it.
So well, as I said I think that this is just a matter of incompetence (ie. automated message gone wrong).
EDIT: typo
I incline towards the opinion that these sharks do it quite deliberately. They just don't care how many people they embarrass and annoy, as long as some of those tech-innocent grannies and plumbers join up and thus put figures on their business projection sheets that get these sharks closer to cashing in big on an FB style IPO.
And the messages Facebook sends me telling me about an event and letting me know that one of my friends is a guest, when they've been invited but haven't actually confirmed.
Might even cover that 800k fine easily.