On Profit

I work for a big tech company—a megacorp—that for the sake of a simple life I’ll refer to as $company.

I have noticed that discourse about $company often over simplifies to an extent that removes all value from the conversation.

For example, take this common refrain:

> You won’t get anything from $company for free—they exist to make a profit, and you’re the product.

I can see that that’s a convenient way to think about $company, but it’s not correct.

Multifaceted

The truth is that $company is not a single entity acting towards simple and well defined goals; it’s a collection of many thousands of people working towards broadly aligned goals.

You can, very definitely, get something from $company for free. There is, I am certain, a feature you could personally benefit from today that was built, from start to finish, by engineers who were not thinking about collecting your data, or selling your data, or capturing your interest, or influencing you in any way.

Most of what $company does is carried out by engineers who care about what they’re working on at that moment, and care about it being something of high enough quality that you might want to use it. They care about giving you value. They do not care, at all, about extracting value from you—because it is simply not their job.

Nor is there anybody whose job it is to check all projects and inject profit-seeking behaviour into them. A project that is not trying to make a profit, is not trying to make a profit. It’s that simple. Use it, and you get something for free.

A trivial example that likely applies to you is open source software; most likely you are directly using software partly built by $company today.

It’s true that the engineers were paid by $company, and that $company may do other things you disapprove of. This is a very loose connection, but it is what it is; if that causes you to avoid everything $company does then that’s entirely up to you.

Complicated Issues

This is not at all to minimize the issues of privacy, freedom, and so on.

They are supremely important.

At $company, as (I imagine) at other megacorps, there are policies in place about how data is handled—about what is okay and what is not. And not just policies; everything is set up, from system design to org structure to tooling to training, so that we get this right by default, right by process, right by monitoring, right by design—always right. There is no room for error.

The details matter. Track record matters. Trust matters.

Given how much the mainstream media shouts about these issues in general, it’s deeply frustrating to me how rarely they ever actually take the time to, say, compare and contrast megacorp track records; or to educate their audience about what the concrete issues are. The mainstream media gets about as far as “cookies == bad”; but why, pray tell, might they be bad? I know—does the journalist? Do the readers?

There are of course issues beyond user privacy; the word “lock-in” inspires fear in the heart of the most stalwart of tech users. Here, too, megacorps and others need to be held to account with a careful eye on the details, not merely rhetoric.

It Matters

If neither the mainstream media nor the tech commentators differentiate good behaviour from bad—if everyone simply throws up their hands and says “it’s for profit, they’ll sell your data any way they can”, ignoring the facts of the matter—then this tilts the playing field towards bad behaviour.

In my little corner of the corporate world we’ll keep doing things the right way regardless, because we want to, irrespective of the policies and processes in place to make sure we do.

It’d be nice, just once, to read in the mainstream media about this side of $company.

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