The moral crisis of Silicon Valley start-ups

NICK Bilton, who wrote in The New York Times, points to the moral crisis that has arisen in Silicon Valley start-ups, as follows:

Ah! Thanksgiving Day! It's time to stop the tedious work and give thanks for the things we have. We express our gratitude to our family, friends and health. Perhaps it is also a good opportunity for us to thank all the tech start-ups that have brought us wonderful things.

Facebook, it provides us with a miraculous platform to connect more than 1.3 billion people around the world. Google, which is still providing us with a steady stream of excellent products, such as Search and mail, provides us with a free sample of ice cream for the summer. We can even express our special thanks to Snapchat, which allows young users to share the fleeting photos and videos that expire.

Of course, how can we forget about Uber, it makes it a little bit better to wave a cab than wait for the court's verdict to give you a sense of what it feels like to be a big tycoon in real estate, Donald Trump.

But when we express our gratitude to all of these companies for the things we offer, I am not sure how grateful they are to us.

In the coming year, when most startups are doing well, there are still bad, even unethical, companies-sometimes they go back on our personal information and sometimes they drill into loopholes in government regulation.

Let's look at a few examples of this year: Facebook thinks it's not a problem to think of people as lab, who, according to a mental study, manipulated more than 500,000 people's news sources and changed the number of positive or negative posts.

Snapchat is indifferent to existing privacy vulnerabilities, resulting in 4.6 million account phone numbers and user names being compromised. Although the company has long known the existence of the problem, but refused to assume any responsibility. Google continues to regard privacy as a stupid thing, and the company has updated its privacy policy to scan people's e-mails at random.

Next, you must know who I'm going to say. By the way, Uber, they have succeeded in raising the company's unethical behavior to a new level.

Uber tried to destroy its rival, Lyft, by instigating the driver into his own arms, undermining Lyft's financing activities, and by means of the cancellation after ordering, fictitious more than 5,000 false car service in the name of Lyft. Then, just last week, Uber in the face of fierce media criticism, and a senior company official said they were going to retaliate against journalists who had written the company's negative reports, digging deep into the dark side of the journalists. The company also admits that they can use an internal tool called "God View" to track the location of anyone using a Uber taxi service.

Gee！

Uber is "the most morally corrupt company in the history of Silicon Valley," Lyft's investor and co-founder Thiel, PayPal, told CNN Money in an interview.

Although each industry has its own ethical differences, Silicon Valley is an exception. The amount of money flowing to these tech companies is huge, and a lower-level engineer will earn more than a Hollywood actor if the company can make a successful IPO. These startups are often founded by young men who don't have enough life experience to realize that their actions can have serious consequences. In addition, these young founders (who often see Steve Jobs as an idol in their upbringing) are more concerned about success than anything else.

Unlike other industries, in the technology industry, there is basically no legal regulatory measure to ensure that things do not go in the wrong direction. Even on Wall Street, the government has imposed various rules to protect people from harm.

On Wall Street, it's unthinkable to look at customers ' privacy information at random. While we cannot use Wall Street as a moral benchmark, we have been expecting Silicon Valley to "make our world a better place". Therefore, we always expect these technology companies to practise higher ethical standards.

I don't think most startups are deliberately malicious. I think they are just so eager to succeed that they sometimes transcend the moral code and forget that people are affected by what they do. Snapchat, for example, knew about the existence of a privacy loophole a few weeks ago, but was indifferent.

However, ethical experts point out that there is no excuse for companies to exist in this regard. "No matter how innovative your business model is and how disruptive it can be to the world, ethics is still the basic principle that companies need to follow," said Chris MacDonald, editor-in-chief of Business Ethics Review, a nonprofit journal Chris Macdonald. "Any company needs to maintain a certain level of morality because it is the only way to differentiate them from outright crime," he said. ”

Some believe that these young companies need to act in a conservative and prudent way for adult regulation. But let us not forget that there are already adults in the company: venture capitalists who invest in these companies will help the company grow. However, these investors tend to look at these issues from a different perspective, they just want to argue as little as possible, and their bank accounts are as big as possible.

Part of the problem, says Mr MacDonald, is that there is no incentive, financially speaking, for these companies to do the right thing. Companies like Uber or Facebook have been in the past, but can still grow at an alarming rate. But he also points out that if these companies go too far on this road, there will be two outcomes for them: consumers will either turn to other companies or have recourse to regulators, which would attract enough public attention. Then the game is over.

"There is a limit to the government's tolerance of what these companies do," he said. There is always someone who can finally find a way to constrain Uber.

We want these startups to be more focused on building a better world, because it's not an interesting thing for some companies to be thankful for the government's intervention in the Thanksgiving Day.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)