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[return to "Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant"]
1. tobbyb+Bl[view] [source] 2016-01-06 07:41:06
>>syness+(OP)
I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance.

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.

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2. Sir_Su+zm[view] [source] 2016-01-06 08:05:17
>>tobbyb+Bl
I'm inclined to agree. I'd like to see more active ostracisation against software developers that have worked for organisations like the NSA and GCHQ. If we can make it a career ending job, it will dramatically reduce their ability to recruit.

However, I'd also like to see general software development think more closely about the role it has in normalising these things. Next time you start to create an account system for your project, ask yourself whether you really need it. Could you engineer around it, perhaps by letting the user store their data, or using a stored key to identify them? Let's go beyond don't store what you can't protect, and aim for don't store what you don't strictly need.

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3. rhino3+Qm[view] [source] 2016-01-06 08:11:35
>>Sir_Su+zm
How is Google or Facebook any better? They are spy agencies for advertising purposes instead of national security.

Or companies that deploy ad sense or otherwise depend on companies like Google or Facebook.

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4. Cakez0+dz[view] [source] 2016-01-06 12:01:26
>>rhino3+Qm
People have a choice (at least to some extent) about the data they share with Google and Facebook. There is no such choice about the information that governments scoop up.
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