Is anyone in tech truly immune from the lure of the big bucks that come from mining user data?

Not just in the short haul, but over the long haul — like 25 years?

Certainly not Google, with its management-trashed “don’t be evil.”

Or Facebook, that continually violates its users in the name of revenue.

but there is one site known to techies and the rest of us alike.

Craigslist.

Craigslist started as an email listserv in 1995, when early web enthusiasts were looking for a sense of community and DIY education. By 1996, it had become a website with job listings, apartment rentals, and personal ads. Almost as soon as the internet was becoming widely available—roughly 1 out of 5 households was online at the time—Craigslist was there to help people find roommates, look for jobs, go on blind dates, or sell used furniture.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has been at the helm since 2001, and the founder, Craig Newmark, is still involved in the company. For years, Newmark did customer service, responding to design complaints and concerns about scams. Today, Craigslist has more monthly page visits than The New York Times or ESPN, and it’s been incredibly profitable.

Its profitability might come as a surprise to some. Many of those I spoke with thought Craigslist was a nonprofit or that it was community-run. In fact, Craigslist has always charged money for certain ads, such as job postings and classified ads. (By siphoning revenue from classified ads, Craigslist has been one reason newspapers across the country have struggled to stay in business.)

More recently, Craigslist has started charging for other kinds of ads, such as real estate listings from firms and car ads from dealers.

But regular users don’t have to pay a fee. The site doesn’t display banner ads, nor does it sell user data to third parties.

Way back when Craigslist was a startup I met Craig and found him to be a very nice, unassuming guy and it seems  he’s still the same, as reflected in a 20017 interview.

“Basically I just decided on a different business model in ’99, nothing altruistic,” he said. “While Silicon Valley VCs and bankers were telling me I should become a billionaire, I decided no one needs to be a billionaire — you should know when enough is enough. So I decided on a minimal business model, and that’s worked out pretty well. This means I can give away tremendous amounts of money to the nonprofits I believe in … I wish I had charisma, hair, and a better sense of humor,” he added in a completely deadpan voice. “I think I could be far more effective.”

Current entrepreneurs seem more focused on charisma, hair, and reaching unicorn status via multiple rounds of investment. A sense of humor is considered optional.

Image credit: Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter

If, like me, you wonder if there is anything to stop tech from its all-consuming forward march, there may be.

Tech needs two things to keep going

• workers and
• users

So what happens when those segments start rebelling?

There’s a tech backlash best seen in the newest crop of workers.

“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”

Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”

“It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.”

Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”

“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”

Oops, seems that the moral considerations of where to work are of much more importance for both college and grad students.

Agriculture is supposed to be a market “ripe for disruption,” including tractors that do everything except scratch your back.

You’d think farmers would be cheering.

Instead they are searching out tractors made in the 1970s and 80s that are more profitable to use.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.

Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.

And it’s the “sophisticated software” they don’t want.

But tractors from the 1970s and 1980s aren’t so dramatically different from tractors produced in the 2000s, other than the irksome software, and at a time when farmers are struggling financially, older tractors can make a lot of business sense.

Both are good news.

Constricting the worker pipeline at one end and a user rebellion at the other are two of the few things that can act as Daniel to tech’s Goliath.

Image credit: Roger W

It’s said that people don’t leave companies, they leave bosses, but now and then it’s the top bosses, the ones who control the culture, who create the circumstances that incite an exodus, as opposed to an immediate manager.

That’s what’s going on at Google, according to James Whittaker, who left Microsoft for Google and then left Google to return there.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Googlers have left because of harassment, retaliation, various governments’ contracts/projects, treatment of contractors, and other ethical considerations.

Google’s bosses are also some of the biggest hypocrites in tech. Worse even than Zuckerberg at saying one thing while doing the opposite covertly — especially something that negatively affects the entire planet, not just people’s privacy.

Despite making noises about becoming more environmentally friendly, Google has been quietly funding organizations which say climate change isn’t real [emphasis mine].

Fortunately, all the clandestine stuff keeps surfacing and people are coming to the realization that Google is anything but benevolent.

All these things fall under the culture umbrella.

A culture controlled by Google bosses.

Image credit: Nguyen Hung Vu

Last week we saw how the best places to work rankings change — Google was number one for six straight years, now it’s number eight, while Facebook dropped to seventh place.

People change too. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was named the world’s most reputable CEO in 2018, didn’t even make the top 10 this year.

Friends and family often aren’t aware of the most current news about a company and even when they are they may minimize it, especially if the company is hot or an icon.

This isn’t just about Google; Facebook, Amazon or dozens of others that are just as problematical.

Hot startups encourage you to jump in without due diligence. WeWork may seem like an extreme example, but it’s not as uncommon as you might think — remember Theranos, Uber and Zenefits.

It’s about how fast things change, both the big stuff and the little stuff, all the stuff that underlies culture and trust, which can and should affect your decisions.

Because it’s your career, your life and, corny as it may sound, your soul.

Image credit: chaukhat.com

Next Monday’s Oldie is about what to look for when choosing a place to work, with a special caution for unicorns.

Today I thought we’d take a quick look at a “great place to work” myth.

Google topped the best places to work lists for years, but no more.

According to the 2019 Glassdoor survey Google is in 8^th place based on 9186 reviews.

Last year 20,000 people walked out in protest over the handling of sexual harassment accusations and Google promised to do better.

But almost a year after the historic walkout, a dozen current and former Google employees told Recode that many employees are still justifiably afraid to report workplace issues because they fear retaliation. They say the company continues to conceal rather than confront issues ranging from sexual harassment to security concerns, especially when the problems involve high-ranking managers or high-stakes projects. …dozens more employees say that when they filed complaints with Google’s human resources department, they were retaliated against by being demoted, pushed out, or placed on less desirable projects.

… Google’s top-down culture that suppresses meaningful employee pushback — even in areas the company says it’s trying to improve on, like diversity.

To really find out about a company you need to do the same depth of due diligence on it that the company does on you.

That requires more than reading employee reviews; it means searching traditional media as well as proven new media.

And checking out who left and why.

Most of all it means making the time to just do it.

Image credit: Ben Nuttall

Yesterday I commented that no matter how stellar someone’s past performance it wasn’t a guarantee of future performance.

There are very few guarantees in life, but I do know of one thing you can count on.

And that is that the bosses of big tech lie.

They do it with flair, sincerity, a straight face and in writing.

Their devices listen to and share your words with outsiders — outside the company and the country.

Although no immediate action was taken against Apple or Amazon— which both have been found to also listen in on their users — the commissioner’s report “invited” the companies “swiftly review” their policies and procedures.

Apple says, “all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements,” but we all know that people blab.

The Terms of Service (TOS) go beyond straight lies by being opaque and obfuscated. Their rules and meaning are a constantly moving target that even the NYT can’t figure out

The Times reported 46 of the accounts to Instagram, the site responded within 24 hours that none violated its rules, without explaining why.

The accounts were scams using scraped images of innocent US military personnel to get money from innocent US citizens.

While fraud has proliferated on Facebook for years, those running the military romance scams are taking on not only one of the world’s most influential companies, but also the most powerful military — and succeeding.

Apparently fraud doesn’t violate the TOS.

But why should it, since violence, hate speech and bullying don’t.

It’s not as if your data is unidentifiable (there’s no such thing as “anonymized data”).

And “we care about your privacy” is the biggest lie of all.

Image credit: Mike Mozart

Yesterday we saw how companies often equate ‘happy’ with fun and fun with games.

Beyond that they seem to think that money buys happiness and will solve most, if not all, motivation issues; an attitude especially prevalent in tech.

That would mean that the well-paid employees with plenty of games at Google and Facebook are among the happiest workers. Right?

Wrong.

Not even close.

Who are the happiest, with the highest job satisfaction level?

According to a new survey from Bloomberg’s Work Wise (tada) the top five happiest professions are:

The median salary of four of the five is just under $50K

Tech doesn’t even make the list.

More proof that happiness is about far more than money, let alone games.

Image credit: Bloomberg

As quoted in yesterday’s Golden Oldie, Columbia law professor Tim Wu said, Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.

His premise is that the more convenient something is, e.g., Amazon, the more likely people will gravitate to it, rather than trying something new.

Think about it.

Amazon. Facebook. Google. Microsoft.

Over the years, many companies, from startups to giants, have challenged them and have either been bought, bankrupted or buried.

Either can be a solution when your resources are almost unlimited, whether the money is spent on acquisition or increasing convenience.

Simple as 1-2-3-4

More convenience = stronger addiction = fewer competitors = greater monopolistic actions.

So the next time you find yourself concerned or complaining about the power of big tech try looking in the mirror for its source.

Image credit: Alena Navarro- Whyte

I’ve written before that Alphabet has no scruples about how its various parts make money as long as they do.

YouTube is the most obvious proof.

It wasn’t until major brands pulled their ads that YouTube cleaned up a tiny bit of its act.

YouTube has previously been forced to make major changes because of advertiser backlash. In 2017, hundreds of brands pulled their advertising from YouTube after The Times reported their ads were appearing next to extremist videos. Dubbed the “YouTube Adpocalypse,” the mass boycott cost YouTube’s parent company, Google, an estimated $750 million, a note from analysts at Nomura Instinet said at the time.

When a “soft-core pedophile ring” was exposed last February YouTube disabled comments on most videos featuring kids, but only because big advertisers walked.

More recently, in spite of concerns over breeches of child privacy, brands have stayed steady and YouTube has done nothing to change.

Nor will it.

Because YOU don’t matter

YOU are a user.

Content providers are users.

As Forrester analyst Renee Murphy says,

“Users are the product, not the customer.”

Brands are the customer.

And the customer is always right.

Image credit: Joegoauk Goa

Yesterday you met the founder of a tech company that voluntarily shut down because its app was being abused.

Google, however, is playing its standard game of privacy announcements that sound great, but…

Users can now opt-in to have their location data automatically deleted from Google every three or every 18 months, depending on their preference.

The catch, of course, is the timeframe. If you bother deleting your info daily or weekly, as do many people, especially from their kids phones, Google’s offer of three or 18 months isn’t very attractive.

That’s plenty of time for the data to migrate.

Win-win for Google.

Makes them sound as if they are doing something big for your privacy, without actually costing them anything.

Guess that’s the difference between a company with a real conscience and one with a good feel for PR.

Image credit: Joakim Jardenbergerg