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Ethically minded engineers don't go work for Facebook in the first place.


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This was news … 5 years ago, I think, I don’t know why it blew up again. But context matters:

Onavo provided a compression + VPN service for people traveling; they let users use little or no data while roaming, and still get internet access. I do not know what their original business plan was, but Facebook bought them for the ability to spy on users.

Their MITM was, in fact, the raison d’etre of Onavo. And then, they were bought by Facebook. And then there was just some more analytics added. At no point, as I understand it, was it built explicitly for evil - and I suspect very few employees were in on the real reasons.

Plausible deniability works for many things.


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