I was powerless to stop it. I was just a junior engineer, and it was decided by the CEO to do the project. So, actually, I feel I made the right choice -- I participated in the project but worked hard on making sure it was as limited as possible. I successfully advocated for several categories of logs to not be sent because they were not required by law.

So, yes, I regret I couldn't do more, but I don't regret the choices I made with the information I had and the position I was in.

Just a stranger on the internet, but FWIW I'm proud of you. You did what you could, and you're cognizant of your actions.

Thank you.

> I was powerless to stop it.

You couldn't have stopped someone from building it. But you could have refused to work on it on principle, or even have become a whistleblower.

Yes, doing so might have been infeasible for you, particularly if you couldn't risk a temporary loss of income. But your involvement was, nevertheless, a choice, and it's important to acknowledge that.

edit: If it was exactly 5 years ago, you may recall that, when you were working on this, China was starting to round up Uighurs to send them to concentration camps. Nobody should take working on this sort of thing lightly.

If they refused the work and let someone else who cared less about limiting the amount of data, things would be worse.

Also what would whistleblowing do? A lot of companies were operating in China and followed similarly privacy-hostile regulation.

Also to bring up Uighurs in this is ridiculous. Logging ips and urls has no direct correlation with being able to round people up in concentration camps. It has nothing to do with what the Uighurs ideologies were, it has something to do with who they are and the cultural differences they had with mainland China.

To try and look down your nose at an engineer who did the best they could with the position they were in with the belief that there was more that could be done is just naive.

You may recall that, when someone blew the whistle on Google Dragonfly, a censored search engine intended for use in China, the public outrage was enough to bring the project to a halt. The same might well have happened to Akamai.

Regardless: this whole attitude strikes me as an overly utilitarian outlook. Yes, if someone else handled the development, the consequences might well have been worse. But it is still wrong to participate in an injustice when you have the opportunity not to do so. "I was just following orders" is a pretty weak excuse.

Again, if the commenter had no other options because they couldn't risk the loss of income, that would be a good reason, but it isn't clear that that was the case.

I think it's pretty naive to assume that this project wouldn't have been used against the Uighur population, given how China has used extensive surveillance against them.

I applaud you. I absolutely did not intend to rub it in or make you feel worse than you might already (which it sounds like you have little reason to). I admire you sharing your experience and being honest about it without beating yourself up too much. The world is made better by little decisions for the good like the ones you made. Thank you.

> I was powerless to stop it.

You could have found a new job, driving up their costs or delaying them slightly.

And what purpose would that have ultimately served?

Sending a message, driving up their costs and delaying them slightly.