As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible.
As engineers & designers, we need to stop being complicit and building this shit nor working for such awful companies. If the majority of engineers become ethical then companies like Facebook, Google, etc will have a hard time hiring people to do their dirty work.
> As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible.
I'd love an app where I could define companies, people and perhaps countries I don't want to pay so that I'm notified when browsing to a site, or scanning a product to buy so that my time and money could be invested elsewhere.
Adblocking is a good start. For physical products .. it's a lot harder. I don't want to go full "no ethical consumption under capitalisim", since that's useless, but basically everything that isn't specifically marketed as ethical probably is doing something wrong in the supply chain somewhere, and half of the "ethical" claims are dubious too.
> I don't want to go full "no ethical consumption under capitalism"
True but one step at a time in the right direction is all it takes for change. Say if I got shafted by Expedia. I would like to add them to my "do not buy" list and have their other brands (e.g. orbitz, travelocity etc) added to the do not buy list. Could make it social so that if my sister got shafted by some company I could see that too and opt for an alternative. There are often stories about unethical companies (Monsanto for example which is now owned by Bayer). I'd like to avoid them, but the burden of doing so prevents it. Lower that burden, provide alternatives and maybe over time we'd see improved ethics and accountability.
Is there a way to restrict your card so you can’t buy things from certain vendors? Then you could subscribe to a list of boycotts based on which ethical questions are important to you.
I’m not sure how else to keep track of everything you want to vote-with-your-wallet against.
Groupthink, impostor syndrome and 'fitting-in-ism' rule the day Nextgrid, there's no chance you're going to get a fresh grad out of university fighting for 'ethics' when they're too busy jumping hoops for their management overlords
Or more simply just trying to make rent, school loan payments, etc. When you're broke, ethics are hard to keep when someone is promising lots of money.
As engineers & designers, we need to stop being complicit and building this shit nor working for such awful companies. If the majority of engineers become ethical then companies like Facebook, Google, etc will have a hard time hiring people to do their dirty work.