Google’s Inhumane Products

Google’s engineers, who necessarily see individuals as conduits of electronic information, are ill-equipped to design privacy regulations—the company should hire anthropologists. “Engineers are actually the worst people on the planet to make [privacy] decisions because they have, essentially, a cybernetic view of the world. To them, the world is little more than a system. And in that system, human autonomy plays a very small part, if it plays any part at all. They just don’t get it; they don’t get that people are making choices all the time and that different information has different values. Google think they are pioneering a brave new world because they have a very limited conception of what a human being is. They are contemptuous of the idea of a human being as a sovereign, an individual making their own decisions and choices. … There are sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists—with many decades of experience in how people relate to each other—who are better suited to designing these services.”