Posted by rzk 4 hours ago
Note also there's a direct response from Persona's security team here[1], and a lot of back and forth from Rick on Twitter[2].
[1]: https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
[2]: https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20
Glad to know that my tinfoil hat wasn't too tight when social media came to be and this obvious use was predicted. How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
[0] https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
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TL;DR we're not responsible, go talk to LinkedIn.
We need far stronger laws for all of it, which will never happen because the rot and corruption has fully metastasized.
Persona's side of the story.
Having any kind of agency in those things would be a start.
If <FAANG bigcorp of your choice> announces with great fanfare "We're building this totally awesome new technology that will make everything better! And the best thing? You won't have to do anything, we will auto-update all your devices/accounts/etc with it for free! Trust us!", then whether you personally believe their enthusiastic predictions or not doesn't really matter a lot - you will get it anyway, unless you spend a lot of energy to deliberately avoid the new technology.
Who wins at the end?
Also every technological step? Ever? Really? This wouldn't happen to be typed on a computer from a climate-controlled room on a nice global network or anything?
> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
I wouldn't call this much of a society if people's eyes are open.
What's that song name, they don't care about us?
The surveillance apparatus isn't new. What's new is that you need fewer people with moral objections in the loop to operate it.
This is just furthering the previous history. Currently, the lords have just been able to keep the serfs appeased to a longer extent. Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.
this is a completely "WEIRD" outlook.. more than half of humanity has no illusions about "proletarians" they do not even discuss it that way
source: born and raised WEIRD
Reprehensible.
Additionally, people are typically only "gifted" on one domain -- if one's gifted enough in the domain of intellect to become a SWE, they're typically lacking elsewhere, whether that be in moral scruples or the ability to discern social things such as when they're working for sociopaths.
Because they believe that it's going to be build anyone by someone else?
Because they are not entirely aware of what they are building?
Hope this helps.
“Hey boss man, why does this database ‘tracked_individuals’ have columns for license plate numbers, home addresses, and political affiliations?”
Give me a break
You can hire sociopaths to work the ~1% of jobs that require a complete understanding of your moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, none of these people ever apologized for their ethical flexibility because it's precisely what qualifies them for such a lucrative job. Persona can be a shell org with 20 evil engineers while their partners absentmindedly do the integration work.
Edit:forgot the most obvious... money
A common theme in a lot of movies, books, et..
they think what they're doing is actually good for society
not everyone is in the hackerspace libertarian / socialist sphere
i used to work for a place that used persona despite it adding extra friction to signups (literally resulting in less paying customers to the dismay of PMs) because it was worth it to combat fraud. theres a tradeoff in everything
We saw it with Bitlocker, we saw it with Client Side Scanning, we see it with Salt Typhoon. Most people that work on weaponized surveillance systems are entirely apathetic, or see themselves as righteous. Even when the system is known to be bugged, obviously flawed, or outright controlled by a foreign adversary.
Immoral boot-licking human engineers are indistinguishable from LLMs.
Or does Persona provide that by default? Don't know much about their service...