for people who work in big tech companies like google, microsoft, etc:
have you ever had to write an evil line of code, as in one with a backdoor, or maybe something privacy violating?
please share your story
@daksh The most vile thing I did while being employed by a certain tech company (far from Facebook or Google on the scale of being evil) — we've read crash reports and laughed at the names our customers' computers had. Some were hilarious.
I've never sent a single crash report ever since 😅
@m0xee haha, well that's kiiiind of different, since it's the employ doing it
@daksh I still think it's disturbing. A lot of people, especialy non-tech-savvy ones, don't even think how this information is handled, what kind of information gets sent with crash reports. And if they knew, they'd be concerned.
Free software often lets you view what is sent and explicitly approve it, non-free software more often doesn't.
So it is still privacy violating in a way, but yes, it is out of scope of your question.
@daksh Oh, sorry, I didn't make my point clear.
Companies could fix this by making crash reporting more transparent, but often choose not to. For example in Windows you can only flip the switch, whether you want to send "extended" info or not. What is extended and what is a bare minimum is not obvious. Apple's crash reporter used to be better, still not perfect.
There are good implementations: all information gets divided in sections and you can place a checkmark against each section.
@daksh
For example software just crashes on some invalid input, devs need only problem description to reproduce it and probably the logs, but you don't want them to see your open windows so you exclude the screenshot. Other issue is a GUI bug so you send the screenshot, but not the system logs.
If the user doesn't care he could just use the defaults, but there should be choice.
This is a real privacy issue, just not the kind you wanted to discuss 😅
@m0xee i agree, but this ones on the employ abusing his or her power, and not the company being evil