Ahh, Thanksgiving, the time of year to stop the daily drudgery and give thanks for what we have. To be grateful for our family, friends and health. Maybe this is also a perfect time to be thankful for all the wonderful things technology start-ups have done for society.
There's Facebook, which has magically enabled more than 1.3 billion people to connect with one another from anywhere on the globe. There's Google, which continues to hand out great products, such as search and mail, like free ice cream samples on a warm summer day. We can even give special thanks to Snapchat, which enables teenagers to share ephemeral pictures and videos that won't catch up to them later.
Then, of course, there's Uber, which has made hailing a taxi feel less like a prison sentence and more like you're Donald Trump.
But while we're thankful for all that these companies have done, I'm not sure how thankful these companies are for us.
While (most) start-ups have been on better behavior this year, there have been dozens of instances when they acted poorly, even unethically - sometimes playing fast and loose with our personal information, other times taking advantage of the lack of government oversight.
Let's recap a few instances this year: Facebook thought it was perfectly O.K. to make people into unwitting guinea pigs when it manipulated over a half-million people's news feeds to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw as part of a psychological study.
Snapchat seemed fine not fixing a privacy breach that compromised the phone numbers and user names of as many as 4.6 million accounts. (The company also refused to take any responsibility for the breach, even though it knew about the problem in advance.) Google continued to treat privacy like it was a just a silly thing, when the company updated its privacy policy to scan people's emails.
And then (you know where this is going) there's Uber, which took unethical corporate behavior to a new level.
Uber tried to eviscerate its rival, Lyft, by aggressively poaching drivers, sabotaging its fund-raising and ordering and canceling more than 5,000 fake rides. Then last week, a media storm was set off when an Uber executive revealed that the company had spied and tried to dig up dirt on journalists who wrote negative things about it. And, the cherry on top, the company admitted it could geo-track any Uber consumer with an internal tool called 'God View.'
Yikes!
Uber is 'the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley,' said an investor in Lyft, the PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, in an interview with CNN Money.
While every industry has its moral quandaries to contend with, Silicon Valley is in another orbit. The money in tech is gargantuan; the highest paid actors in Hollywood, for example, make less than low-level engineers during an initial public offering of a tech company. Start-ups are often run by whiz kids who don't have the life experiences to understand that their actions can have severe consequences. Plus, these young founders (who often grew up idolizing Steve Jobs) are more concerned with winning than anything else.
Unlike most other industries, there's almost no legal oversight in techland to ensure things don't go awry. Yet even on Wall Street, as my colleague Neil Irwin wrote on The Upshot in The New York Times last week, the government has put rules in place to protect people.
'The idea of a showing up to a meeting with a JPMorgan executive and hearing, 'I notice you were late on your mortgage payment last month,' is just unfathomable,' Mr. Irwin wrote. 'The same could be said for any number of other industries where big companies have access to private data. Hotel chains? Retailers? This is just not the way things work.'
We can't exactly hold Wall Street up as a bastion of ethics. But given that Silicon Valley tends to copy and paste the mantra, ' we're making the world a better place,' it seem reasonable to expect that tech companies would hold themselves to a higher ethical standard.
I don't believe that most start-ups are trying to be malicious and evil. But I think they are so hungry to win that they sometimes are willing to bend ethical rules and forget that real people are affected by their actions. For example, Snapchat knew about its privacy loopholes for weeks, but did nothing to plug them.
Yet ethics experts say that this is no excuse. 'No matter how disruptive or innovative your business is, there are still ethical values that are fundamental that businesses have to pay attention to,' said Chris MacDonald, co-editor of the Business Ethics Journal Review, a nonprofit publication. 'All business relies on some sense of ethics because that's what differentiates it from plain old crime.'
Some believe that what these young companies really need is old-fashioned adult supervision. But let us not forget, there are already adults in the room: the venture capitalists who invested in these companies to help them grow. Yet investors tend to look the other way, saying nothing as they hope the controversy will grow smaller as their bank accounts grow bigger.
Mr. MacDonald noted that part of the problem with tech companies is that, from a financial perspective, there is no incentive to do the right thing. Companies like Uber or Facebook have done the wrong thing in the past and still grown at staggering rates. But, he said, when companies go too far, there are two outcomes: either customers will find an alternative or regulators, with enough public outcry, could break up the party.
'There's a limit to how much a company can push and shove people before Big Brother decides they are going to have to step in,' he said. 'With tech companies, there is the fact that at some point you can do without them. There can be something after Facebook. And someone can eventually figure out how to beat Uber.'
Let's hope these start-ups start doing more to make the world a better place, because a Thanksgiving where we're thankful for government regulation may not be fun for anyone.
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