Twitter and Facebook are used frequently to track down foreign combatants to be killed. Should people who work there be shamed as well?
In fact, those social media sites have been used to manipulate foreign militant uprisings and sway political discourses (whether in the U.S. or in other countries).
Also, people who worked on GPS technology are directly responsible for the GPS-guided missiles that have been fired into Syria and other parts of Middle East. Should those people be ashamed as well?
I think this is purposefully muddying the issue - there's a reason that mens rea* is part of law; the state of mind a person has in an action weighs heavily on our judgement of the outcome.
Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are first and foremost data-mining ad agencies that also provide social networking services. The fact that you can also use them to target terrorist is not really a by design item, much like even though you can beat someone to death with a wrench, it's primary function and the design goal behind it is to secure nuts to bolts and screws.
So yes, there is a bit of a difference when Google's tech happens to also be used by the military for image analysis from drones and when Google willingly assists and participates in such projects.
The major concern a lot of people have is that it's a very big switch in market from what they were doing to Project Maven. People who otherwise were maybe concerned, or heck, even satisfied with Google's influence on their lives and happy to participate in reCAPTCHA and pay for Google services now find their work and money being used to pay for something they disagree with.
I do not appreciate the simplification of the outcomes, as no civilized society judges in that way - we consider the motive as well as the outcome, as well as the state of mind of the person who committed the act. Likewise, there's quite a bit of a difference in US Army RnD grabbing an open source project and embedding it into drone guidance systems and Google taking a Government Contract; aside from the willingness of Google in this state, they demonstrate their complicit nature as a company via the contract and the payments; the open source project likely wasn't even aware of it until they read about it in some news article or saw snippets of their code in a Press Release/Demo.
* I realize that this is meant as a method of judging guilt (hence Guilty Mind), but the concept is the same here. The state of one's mind in making an action should be relevant.
I would also say it’s one of the reasons they are getting so much flack at the moment. If the extent of data brokering was crappy mailers I would be far less passionate about the topic.
GPS and other precision guidance systems do help to save civilian casualties by allowing militaries to use smaller and fewer explosives. The designers of GPS have probably saved more lives than any doctors. I want to live in a world without human violence but creating a world like that doesn’t involve banning technology, it requires political action.
And so do weapons, because they can eliminate the very people who are killing civilians. Machine guns and bombs saved millions more Jews from being killed in WWII
In fact, those social media sites have been used to manipulate foreign militant uprisings and sway political discourses (whether in the U.S. or in other countries).
Also, people who worked on GPS technology are directly responsible for the GPS-guided missiles that have been fired into Syria and other parts of Middle East. Should those people be ashamed as well?