We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically.
Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.
What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden.
That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate.
The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.
The government can get your gmail, facebook, verizon, amazon data because those companies keep that data about you. The NSA doesn't need to spy on you, google already does. I don't think the NSA is reading my email, but I know Google is.
Not to mention that when all these tech companies are spying on your for profit, your privacy is already destroyed.
They understand fully that their data is collected and they expect nothing less than the top result of their Google, Amazon, and Facebook queries to match exactly what they are looking for.
But more importantly, sure, there are people who think they deserve to be mistreated, there are people who are drug addicts to the point of barely being anything else and still would fight anyone who gets between them and their dealer, and of course and there are plenty of people who have no problem with all sorts of messed up things up to murder as long as they themselves are not on the receiving end of it. Yet even if 99% of all people regressed to that station, that wouldn't do one bit to diminish my own human rights. That some or even a lot of people are fine with certain things, whether they understand them "fully" or, which I find more likely, "not in the least", is the problem, not the solution.
Drive to the extreme: he right of people to do what the White Rose did will always outweigh the right of people to not be part of the White Rose. It's dissidents and persecuted minorities who define the boundaries of these things, not the people who are living in comfort in exchange for not standing up for anything or against anyone. They exist, and their opinion matters as a problem to be solved or worked around, but that's the extent of it. Some things can not be justified by anyone agreeing to them, people do not have that power even when numbering billions.