Resisting production isn't unethical, but telling your client to commit fraud is illegal, unethical, and waives attorney-client privilege.

Generally that lawyers in tech can be both good and bad, but that both the culture at west coast tech companies and how they handle their attorneys often leads to ethical issues that just do not happen in more buttoned down industries elsewhere. In particular many tech companies are just more protective of employees for no discernable purpose. An investment bank faced with a similar situation as the DC v. Meta case would have blamed and terminated the employees and attorneys involved, and trussed them up for prison if needed to protect the company. An oil company accused of faking environmental studies would throw the guy who doctored them under the bus.

This also serves the public interest (although some may disagree) because it preserves a productive company and provides a powerful incentive for management to grind individual corporate criminals into meatballs to protect itself and shareholders.

Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.

The other stupid thing that Meta did was commissioning these studies in the first place. What is the company doing? How does this benefit shareholder value? Is this a jobs program? If you did not like the answers they might give you, you should never have paid a bunch of academics to do these studies in the first place. The company sells digital fent to the masses. Of course it's bad for kids. You don't need a study to tell you that.

> Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.

It's unchecked greed, that's the thing. It absolutely makes sense if you know you can bring your guy into the office of President - print money and if you break laws and get caught before the President is on your side, use all your resources to prolong the case just enough.

And lo and behold, we saw one Big Tech exec after the other swear fealty to Trump. A mixture of rule by mob (it was literally called the "PayPal mafia") and neo-feudalism.

No, the "unchecked greed" is to keep on doing the illegal thing because you know you'll get rewarded in the end. The "right" thing to do would be to admit you fucked up, fire the persons responsible (including, if need be, up to the top levels) and stay on the right side of the law.

Meta chose the other option - keep breaking the law and use all resources at their disposal to delay any sort of consequences.

> Attorney client privilege is unethical.

the article doesn't argue this. It argues that sometimes attorney client privilege can be abused to shield criminal acts and that lawyers and state bar associations have a role to play in preventing those abuses and holding violators accountable, which hasn't happened in this case.

> Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical.

It doesn't say this either. It talks about the deliberate destruction of evidence of actual crimes and the intentional suppression of the truth so that people can continue to be hurt.

> Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do.

I have no idea where you even got that impression.

I have a legal background and am used to HN saying quite...interesting...things, and I've been here for 16 years, so I think I can translate the last one.

The idea is the Meta researcher who said every time they put on a headset, they ended up seeing sexual acts from adults directed at children, was the problem because they were collecting data on children.

> Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical.

This, to me, is the crime. They are purposefully destroying data because they know it poses a legal risk to them. That is different from deleting data that is costing you money and isn't useful to your business. This is also different than counseling them to delete data to avoid problems if there is a security breach. Both of these are valid reasons to delete data in support of the business and in defense of risks associated with holding that data. Counseling that you should delete data because it may be used as evidence against you in a criminal probe though is obstructing foreseeable future investigations because you believe you may be committing crimes. The distinction, I think, is clear.

I agree with you that lawyers should be aggressive about protecting their clients and counseling them but when that counsel is to tell them to obstruct investigations they, to me, are now part of the crime.

as a lawyer, I'll just note that the legal system has standards for this. specifically, you can't delete stuff that poses legal risks to you once you reasonably expect a lawsuit about it. but you can delete it as part of normal business activity until that point.

    I personally don't see these as bad things.

With the dose of bad faith you put on those arguments, it sounds like you would fit right in with the described Meta lawyers. I'm not sure it's even worth engaging with you considering how you engaged with the content by ignoring the preface about John Adams and the ethics of practicing law.

Every now and then I get the suspicion hacker news is used to practice sophistry for the workplace without the risk of making yourself look like a jackass at work.

Of course it would break the rules about civility here to directly accuse someone of that. Which makes me want to joke that it's an intentional feature of the site and explains why a VC firm wants to run a tech watering hole.

Sometimes I think people are so into libertarian views as almost to be a religion that they see anything a government would do an ethically evil act, so it appears they have no morals/ethics of their own when they share those thoughts.

>ignoring the preface about John Adams

I don't think it was a useful example since what is happening with Meta is different. It's not like a British soldier admitted to Adams that he murdered someone and Adams shared that fact in court.

>- Attorney client privilege is unethical.

Cynically abusing attorney client privilege is unethical and a violation of the powers granted to attorneys by society.

You reframed the researcher's report that every time they put on a headset, children were being sexually harrased by adults as "Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do." -- that one will be clearest to on-lookers, and the other two are just as addled.

I genuinely hope it's out of: a lack of understanding of legal terms, ethics, and how to read critically. And that it is not trolling.

It's quite stultifying to read as someone who does have those understandings.

It reads as lying at best and trolling at worst, but my red-line is assigning motivation.

Which is a shame, because the article is a good example of what happens when you're cowardly and pretend "reacting to what it is" is "assigning motivation": inter alia, a 17 strike sex trafficker policy, signed off by corporate.

This is a breathtakingly disingenuous summary of the article. I cannot imagine a perspective sufficiently warped to produce this interpretation a priori.

Agreed. It’s easy to imagine billions of reasons why people will people will defend indefensible behavior by companies with billions of dollars though.