I think that's unfortunately a climate that arose as a reaction to the sustained appalling behavior by FAANG and wannabe-FAANG cowboys.
When you have a handful of tech companies who systematically, unashamedly and deliberately abuse people's trust and privacy, it ruins the landscape for everyone. As it stands today, our trust has been betrayed so many times that a default assumption that the other actor is malicious and will do the wrong thing is almost always correct.
It's a shame, but this seems to be the case for every industry that is consumed by greed, and almost as a rule, every successful industry will eventually be consumed by greed. It's a local minimum that our society in it's current form cannot seem to avoid.
Well so again I think these are misattributions here. You're using language like "trust," "unashamedly," "malicious," in circumstances where "behavior," "incentives," and "value" are more fitting. This framing is why the pitchforks get yielded with such ferocity, demonization/victimization in situations that require more careful scrutiny and nuance.
> It's a local minimum that our society in it's current form cannot seem to avoid.
It can't avoid it because it is the result of incentives, not specific players. This is why it's so ineffective to brandish hostility towards individuals or even companies: others, up to and including yourself, would do the same things if put in the same positions, because that is what would be best for you (and there are plenty of rationalizations you can come up with to show why it's net good).
To eradicate this kind of thing we cannot be relegated to impotent rage with mob-issued pitchforks at industries or companies or the individuals who operate them, or play the victim card and blame the industry for "betraying our trust." The "why" of this is not an "industry consumed with greed," it is a fundamental result of technological breakthroughs in an economic environment such as ours. When you have bad incentives you will continually get bad actors, and playing whack-a-mole with them will be a fruitless exercise. We have to recognize the systems as a society, not the players, if we are to have any hope of true reformation.
I agree that this is a systemic issue and as long as the system is the same, the outcome is unlikely to change, hence why I wrote "It's a local
minimum that our society in it's current form cannot seem to avoid".
So a change in the system is required to fix the root cause, but I think some amount of pitchfork waving and torch igniting is not out of the order.
The excuse of "everyone would do it with these incentives" is not an excuse for this behavior. And I say that fully admitting that I'm part of the
system (although a different industry), and yes of course I'd do (and am doing) the same given the choice.
Perhaps the pitchforks show the individual the error of their way, and the society will change once enough individuals decide to make the change?
Maybe, I do agree it's warranted to call out bad behavior and impose some penalty on said behavior to discourage it. After all, this "feedback" has elicited a response here at least. But I worry that:
A) It misses the bigger picture and thus doesn't address the underlying cause, thus it will continue to happen over and over.
and
B) It feeds an outrage culture that permeates far too much of our online conversation that requires more nuance and careful dissection, which paired w/ the first leads to division and us vs them mentalities when more than ever we mentalities are needed.
Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to that second one because I'm more focused on systems and because outrage culture, which itself is bourn of other misaligned incentives, is a large problem underlying other issues that I've tended to notice more in my circumstantial isolation. So in a sense I'm being hypocritical when I plead for a more measured and forgiving response as I'm addressing individuals not the systems that caused them to react in this way. Mostly I'm just thinking out loud, as are we all (we're thinking at each other rather than with each other, another issue, related to outrage culture).
Anyway, as I'm in danger of severely incoherent rambling here I'll circle back to say I cautiously agree with you that some measure of pitchfork waving is warranted. But when the CEO makes a response like this, at least on its face an earnest effort to right past wrongs, can't we at least give them a chance to do so? Otherwise the pitchforks lose their meaning as it begins to look like they were out just to be out, and we're more concerned with persecution than actual redemption or resolution.
Well, yes, but now you're saying our trust is limited because other companies do bad.
But we have a pretty good reason, beyond that, to not trust Zoom - THEY clearly never gave a shit about security, given in a few weeks of people taking a slightly deeper look we've had pretty much every possible leak and bug and problem you can imagine crop up.
How long did it take Microsoft to go from "no-shits-are-given-security" to "security-is-core"? 2 decades, something like that?
So yeah, sure, 90 days, that's... well, maybe the beginnings of a start.
Your entire reply feels overly cynical. No, nobody likes it when companies invade your privacy, a la F & G.
However, saying "it took another megacorp twenty years to fix their privacy problems, so we shouldn't trust $relativelysmallcompany for the next two decades" is not fair to $relativelysmallcompany and doesn't even consider the cultural change it probably took to get $megacorp to actually care about security and user privacy.
Personally, I don't really like Zoom. I use it, and it works okay, but there are a lot of little nitpicks I would like to see addressed- for instance, it'd be really nice to be able to adjust individual member's volume levels or be able to mute them outright as a participant instead of listening to a compressor that needs a new bearing in the background for an entire meeting because they're not using push-to-talk and the host just downloaded the client yesterday. I'm also more than willing to give a company time to fix underlying architecture problems and not demand fixes in the meantime.
I would want to be given the benefit of time to fix problems, wouldn't you?
It is not possible to extrapolate with certainty the quality of code from the bugs that remain in it when released.
“There’s a misspelling in the HTTP headers spec, so obviously this was written by amateurs.”
“Browser X has an RCE, so obviously they don’t care about security.”
These are obviously faulty logic when stated about other scenarios, and apply here as well.
Has Zoom been found to have the same specific technical issue reoccurring over multiple releases, to the tune of “buffer overflow” or similar? If so, then that’s a trend to throw up warning flags about.
A series of bugs that share no commonality other than being bugs is, perhaps, not so much.
When you have a handful of tech companies who systematically, unashamedly and deliberately abuse people's trust and privacy, it ruins the landscape for everyone. As it stands today, our trust has been betrayed so many times that a default assumption that the other actor is malicious and will do the wrong thing is almost always correct.
It's a shame, but this seems to be the case for every industry that is consumed by greed, and almost as a rule, every successful industry will eventually be consumed by greed. It's a local minimum that our society in it's current form cannot seem to avoid.