But claiming that google lost it's "moral compass" just now is a claim only rich people can make because they retire, not quit.

Google is literally the largest, most organized, tracking and profiling company in the world. Which they tend to grow even larger with the rise of LLMs.

Turning a blind eye of that for the opportunity or whatever, and than claim that _just now_ they lost their moral compass, is being a hypocrite.

All of my stock has finally vested, and I am independently wealthy enough to signal that I'm quitting purely based on my morals, since there's no way anyone could have known Google wasn't some ethical bastion of hope in 2017.

Don't get me wrong. I hate war. And never-ending wars like the Iraq War anger me to no end (and for that matter, I think G.W. Bush and his cabinet were truly evil). Of course, the danger is real; a military built for defense can easily become an instrument of tyranny or empire if left unchecked. That is why we must maintain rigorous civilian oversight and strict checks and balances over its power. But that does not mean the military, by default, is always evil, right?

I've developed an involuntary, muscle-level reflex that forces me to close the tab immediately when I read these "not just X -- it was Y" LLMisms.

I realize the author might be human and am sorry if that's the case, but I can't help it.

Complete joke, do some introspection.

He is a top expert on a security topic. Running Android platform security gives him an opportunity to have incredible positive impact for many people---which he did for a decade.

People weigh trade-offs.

At the beginning, he may have had high ambitions to deploy interesting, research-forward ideas to Android; at this point, he has accomplished a lot of that. Maybe now, he is considering other factors.

Guessing that people are only money-driven or have made some decision because of threshold personal wealth is awful, especially if you do not know them.

Almost all academics I know (I am one also) are driven by personal curiosity, intellectual ambitions, a need to identify and solve problems, and a strong desire for positive contribution. I know Rene and believe this to be true of him.

I’d just like to add, as always: this person should give back all the money Google paid them. Of course, that has not once happened in the history of these pious pieces, and so the meme endures.

Pretty nice life if you ask me.

> At the moment, my main focus is [...] fighting against (governmental or corporate) mass surveillance

While he always had "Ethics in Computer Science” as an interest, I wonder what blinds people into accepting offers at Google -- the advertising company. I want to take his words as sincere, but Google has been privacy violating for longer than his tenure with android. Money and prestige is a hell of a drug I suppose. He could very well work for grapheneos but no money or immediate persteige there (sadly).

Much harder than taking the money and blindly following management decisions.

Is this the person I have to complain about for the removal of fulldisk encryption in Android 13?

Such a bizarre claim. EU academics seem under mass psychosis lately.

Any statement to the idea of a moral compass is just a form of marketing when the politics of the day align with it.

The best we can to is have independent moralities, while balancing that with the need to eat.

So if you decided to go in 2017 with all that happened since, your moral compass was already broken with google's. Snowden already revealed what all that data was used for with program like PRISM. You already seen the total lack of interest in preventing scams in their ads as long as it brings money. You've seen the antitrust fines. The tax avoidance schemes. The election influence concerns over youtube content.

What I read is "I know have made enough money from Google immorality, I can virtue signal by taking an early retirement and pretend I'm a great person".

The slogans are on the walls because they are not in our hearts.

Google has not changed its moral compass in 20 years. You just didn't want to admit it

Instead of monetising software sales, they monetised access to Free software performing an end run around the GPL by distributing access to it over the internet allowing them to make the public good proprietary google property. They threw out some crumbs at best.

Remember the un-publicised puzzles to paradoxically get media attention, hiring highschool kids with a demo that made the news because it made the news and all the rest of the BS. I guess it worked. Now they're big and bad and the Free software optimism is largely dead so they don't have to bother and now make killbots for the Pentagon.

Where else you gonna work? Go test the market, nerd.

They are now openly partnering with war industries and the government to assist them in doing things like bombing a school full of girls, killing hundreds in an entirely indefensible war of aggression.* This is a very dark red line to cross and despite Googlers being wealthy and privilaged, it is nonetheless a significant protest that deserves to be heard on its own terms. Ideally, a protest would change policy at the company.

Google management: Stop cooperating with the immoral and illegally operating War Department!

* I don't have evidence Google directly participated in the Minab school bombing, but this is the side they are supporting.

sorry not being a jerk but many of these kinds of posts just come off as performative and attention seeking. you could have just quit, literally everyone knows how FAANG operates.

These are the most successful companies in the history of the world. What do you expect? DO you need a PhD to figure this out?

> 3. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.

Really?

Algorithms for ads and mass surveillance were always at the core of Google model.

And there is not really such thing as "internationally accepted norms", Google, as a pioneer, literally defined them at the time.

So if our enemies had no qualms at all about doing this, wouldn't it make sense that we have weapons that can at least counter, and potentially fight back? Would it be facilitating injury if the AI is used to stop an ISIS linked attack in our homeland?

> "Don't be evil"

Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?