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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Technology
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Thanks for including the mirror, OP.
I really despise these practices. I don't know how people can build these tools with a clear conscience.
That’s easy. You just ignore your conscience because money speaks louder to these people.
Jesus fucking Christ. Time to delete the two games I’ve ever downloaded. Dunno if that even helps at this point.
It's not specific to games, it's all apps that have ads
I should have just went back to the flip phone like ten years ago.
I switched to /e/ a while ago, they have a feature called advanced privacy. commercial Lemmy clients like Connect and Raccoon have trackers embedded and are blocked automagically. ^I use Jerboa btw^
Have you seen the job market for programmers lately? It feels like it's almost all for AI slop, abusive rentier middleman business models that add no real value, ~~defense~~ war contractors, or all of the above at once.
That's not to say that it's acceptable for people to work those jobs with a clear conscience; it's to say that for a bunch of people the only ethical options would be to remain unemployed or leave the industry.
I've been seeing exactly that. Reading through these job descriptions is a bit depressing. I can't virtue signal my lack of morality and unthinking subservience to my potential employer hard enough to make cutoff to become "Director of AI Shilling" or a "Dark Pattern Consent Violation Engineer".
I know the kind of environments that won't work for me. This will always limit the jobs I can and can't work and I'm generally okay with that. I would love some of that bountiful defence contractor money, but I can't ethically justify doing work that harms others or limits their freedom. Advertising tech would have been a good fit for me... if I had no sense of ethics.
It's a tough realization that my gaming consoles, GPS Smart Watch, and fancy modern over-engineered car only became possible because tons of money was poured into building out related tech for defence and surveillance.
I imagine the cognitive dissonance must be really strong in someone working for some of these companies that have monetized governmentally sanctioned or corporately opportunistic civil rights abuses. Then again, we're often kept apart, working in our own little areas where we're safe from having to see the whole horrifying machine.
It’s the same for anyone who works for Meta or MS or Google or Anduril or whatever these days: you look at your comp package that’s worth roughly half a million annually, and you say
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They have been paying people to not have morals for quite a while now.