Lettura critica dal NYT.
Ahh, Thanksgiving, the time of year to stop the daily drudgery and give thanks for what we have. To be grateful for our family, friends and health. Maybe this is also a perfect time to be thankful for all the wonderful things technology start-ups have done for society.
There’s Facebook, which has magically enabled more than 1.3 billion people to connect with one another from anywhere on the globe. There’s Google, which continues ...
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...to hand out great products, such as search and mail, like free ice cream samples on a warm summer day. We can even give special thanks to Snapchat, which enables teenagers to share ephemeral pictures and videos that won’t catch up to them later.
Then, of course, there’s Uber, which has made hailing a taxi feel less like a prison sentence and more like you’re Donald Trump.
But while we’re thankful for all that these companies have done, I’m not sure how thankful these companies are for us.
While (most) start-ups have been on better behavior this year, there have been dozens of instances when they acted poorly, even unethically — sometimes playing fast and loose with our personal information, other times taking advantage of the lack of government oversight.
Let’s recap a few instances this year: Facebook thought it was perfectly O.K. to make people into unwitting guinea pigs when it manipulated over a half-million people’s news feeds to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw as part of a psychological study.
Snapchat seemed fine not fixing a privacy breach that compromised the phone numbers and user names of as many as 4.6 million accounts. (The company also refused to take any responsibility for the breach, even though it knew about the problem in advance.) Google continued to treat privacy like it was a just a silly thing, when the company updated its privacy policy to scan people’s emails.
And then (you know where this is going) there’s Uber, which took unethical corporate behavior to a new level.
Uber tried to eviscerate its rival, Lyft, by aggressively poaching drivers,
via www.nytimes.com
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