Defining - and dealing with - Evil

Posted by Chris Becke on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chris Becke
Published on 2010-05-28T07:56:19Z Indexed on 2010/05/28 8:01 UTC
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best-practices

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privacy

As a software developer one sometimes gets feature requests that seem to be in some kind of morally grey area. Sometimes one can deflect them, or implement them in a way that feels less 'evil' - sometimes - on reflection - while the feature request 'feels' wrong theres no identifiable part of it that actually causes harm. Sometimes one feels a feature is totally innocent but various anti virus products start tagging one as malware.

For example - I personally consider EULAs to (a) hopefully be unenforceable and (b) a means by which rights are REMOVED from consumers. However Anti Virus scanners frequently mark as malware any kind of download agent that does not display a EULA. Which to me is the result of a curious kind of double think.

What I want to know is - are there any online (or offline) resources that cover evil software development practices? How can I know if a software practice that I consider dodgy is in fact evil enough to consider fighting?

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