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.
I don't think there's any need to rehash the debate here. Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo. I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing.
It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs. If you don't like what the tech sector is doing, please by all means continue to advocate. Shout it from the mountain tops, go to work for the EFF. But don't discount people that legitimately disagree with you as being irresponsible. At least some of us have made the effort to understand your point of view. The least you could do is to try to understand ours.
Why not? You may disagree, that doesn't mean you can't be flat-out wrong. Having an opinion does not automatically give that opinion equal weight when history has proven to us again and again that that particular opinion ends up with making society either dangerous or at a minimum uncomfortable.
I'm sure there were border guards in former East Germany that were entirely convinced that their state was the greatest and that's why they had to keep people in at all costs, including shooting them if they persisted in believing otherwise and tried to simply leave. After all, that was best for them. But that particular opinion turned out to be very wrong in the long term.
People can rationalize the most absurd stuff to themselves and to others, especially when their pay-check depends on it, but that's not a requirement.
All those that try to pretend that there is some kind of 'reasonable disagreement' possible about the erosion of privacy and that directly and indirectly help to rush in the surveillance state have quite possibly not thought as carefully and have not considered these things with the degree of gravity required as they claim they have. Having a mortgage to pay may factor in there somewhere too.
Usually this is a combination of being too young, too optimistic and in general living too sheltered a life to know what can happen to you, your family and your friends when the tide turns. And the tide always turns, nothing is forever.
> Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo.
I hope you're right but history is not on your side in this case.
> I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing.
Yes, it isn't going to convince you any more than that border guard would be convinced that his job is a net negative to society. Every stream, no matter how reprehensible will always have its fans and cheerleaders. And later on they will never remember that they had agency all along and were perfectly capable of making a different decision. Responsibility is weird that way.
> It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs.
It is not admirable that you are so certain in yours. May I suggest a couple of talks with some holocaust survivors to get a better feel for what the true power of information can get you?
Or maybe the family members of some people that were killed while trying to flee the former SovBlock?
Or maybe some first generation immigrants to the US or Canada or wherever you live to give you some eye witness accounts on what it was like to live in those countries before the wall fell down?
'It can't happen here' is an extremely naive point of view.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide
Agreed with your advocacy advice.
> The least you could do is to try to understand ours.
That's 'mine' not 'ours', you speak for yourself.
I can't think of a case where stable and mature democratic bureaucracy has ever used surveillance to influence the majority of its populace. Germany in the early 20th century was a very instable government in a bad economic situation. Soviet East Germany was communist, which isn't quite the kind of democratic that I meant. It's true that any government could turn bad, in the same way that anything is possible. But there's very little evidence for that in the current context.
So my position is this: Given that I live in the United States in 2016, I'm not worried about the government randomly deciding to screw with me by looking at my electronic communications and acting on them. It just doesn't make sense. I'm not significant relative to the scale of the US government, the government itself just doesn't work that way and all of the negative scenarios I've heard seem to be very contrived.
If you really think that it's possible that the government of a modern western nation could turn into communist East Germany, then it seems like your problem might be with governance, not privacy. If it's possible for the government to go all Walter White and just turn evil over night, then no amount of personal privacy is going to save any of us. And until it seems like that's a thing that's actually possible, I'm going to make practical decisions about my own privacy.