A former Twitter engineer shares the story of when he almost created an ``unethical system''



Elon Musk, the newly appointed CEO of Twitter, has implemented large-scale reforms such as firing half of all employees , and confusion and turmoil are spreading within Twitter. Meanwhile, Steve Krenzel , who works as a software engineer at Twitter, Microsoft, etc., and is the chief engineer at financial technology company Brex at the time of writing, said, ``I was once almost forced to develop an unethical system at Twitter.'' He reveals the 'episodes of time'.



Around 2015-2016, when Twitter's CEO had just been replaced by Jack Dorsey from Dick Costolo , Twitter was facing management problems, and the threat of Twitter closure was greater than many outsiders thought. It was said to be approaching soon.



At the time, Krenzel was a software engineer working on tasks such as reducing bandwidth, memory usage, and battery consumption to make Twitter easier to use for people in emerging markets.



Krenzel, who was able to significantly reduce mobile bandwidth consumption by improving the way Twitter's mobile app uploads user activity logs, is now recognized as the Twitter app's mobile logging expert. It is said that it has become.



Meanwhile, Twitter received a request from a major telecommunications company to ``send signal strength data in North America.'' Krenzel, who worked on developing a service that collects and transmits signal strength data by location, found a range where anonymity could be maintained even when combined with other data sources.



However, the telecommunications company expressed dissatisfaction, saying, ``This data is useless,'' and this time, it said, ``I want to know whether users have entered a competitor's store.'' Although Krenzel implemented the requested features in a way that respected privacy, carriers were still unhappy. So Krenzel had a meeting with the director of the telecommunications company, and the director said, ``We should be able to see when users leave the house, when they go to work, and wherever they are throughout the day. Anything less is pointless.'' 'We have even more data from other tech companies.'



In response to communications companies that disregard user privacy and seek to sell location data of identifiable users, Mr. Krenzel told them in a condescending manner that ``there is no way they would do such a thing.'' At a meeting held internally at Twitter, the Legal Department argued that there was no problem with the user's terms of service. But Krenzel's entire team knew there was a privacy issue, and Twitter had just undergone major layoffs, so they could instead free up resources to develop features that would compromise user privacy. There wasn't.



Mr. Krenzel's team was not affected by the layoffs, but the outflow of human resources did not stop. Mr. Krenzel himself decided to retire because he felt that ``Twitter was no longer a place where I could do good work,'' and in the process he also engaged in actions to cancel a project with a telecommunications company. Krenzel says he'll never forget when a new manager told him, ``If I put some money in a dump truck and give it to you, would you stay on Twitter and make this product?''



Krenzel's last email on Twitter was to then-CEO Dorsey. In response to an email about a project with a telecommunications company, Mr. Dorsey immediately replied, ``Let me check to see if there are any misunderstandings. This is not the right thing to do. I don't want to do that.'' The project has since been halted to Krenzel's knowledge, and Krenzel says Dorsey was actually dissatisfied with the project. However, ``I don't know if this idea applies to Twitter's new owner. I think Elon will do even worse things with the data,'' he said, expressing concern about user privacy on Twitter in the future. Masu.



Wrapping up the thread, Krenzel said, 'For employees who are still on Twitter, don't underestimate the power of pocket beats you have. Things can go wrong, and things can escalate. 'There's a risk of being exposed to headwinds, but good pocket beats are something you learn by using,' he told Twitter employees.



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