I actually don’t understand their sentiment.

This isn’t the only surveillance Google is enabling. You could MAYBE argue genocide but… let’s just say it isn’t just facebook that supports brutal regimes.

I’ve worked for… questionable companies in the past. I still argue that you more or less can’t do Research without getting blood on your hands because… blood money spends well and experiments/development without a defined product is expensive.

But… unless you are a complete moron, you understand that. Don’t get me wrong, there are a LOT of graduate students out there who never question WHY there are government grants and why their advisor is talking to Major Johnson and so forth (Val Kilmer’s Real Genius is probably the most accurate grad school movie ever made…). But you eventually figure it out. ESPECIALLY if you are working for a company and have to have a defined/target product. I know Google/Alphabet is notorious for the cutthroat/backstabbing among employees but you aren’t going to be isolated as to why you are working on a graph search algorithm or how to conceal a camera in a device.

So I don’t know if this engineer was just ridiculously ignorant or if they were hoping to “go viral” or what. But you don’t wake up one day and realize you are the baddies. You more or less realize that your first day of work and spend time deciding if that will lead to alcoholism or activism.