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.
The ability of power or authority to lock you up, take your property or worse your life is protected by rule of law and due process. Having a debate of the rule of law or due process is similar to having a debate on privacy or a surveillance state. The consequences are negative for the individual and society as a whole, even though they may benefit some stakeholders in the short term who will of course advocate for it but on the whole it's not a social good.
The only thing we have to come to this conclusion is history, a wide body of knowledge and reason.
We can thus say with some degree of confidence that a society without rule of law or due process is not a good thing similar to a society with surveillance is not a good thing. We don’t use the ‘moral high ground’ but reason and historical experience to make these conclusions. This is not a moral issue but a practical one that has consequences for our societies. The ethical issue is the social good for the people who build these systems.
Since we are discussing the social good the alternative view needs to be backed by reason on how surveillance can be good for society as a whole, beyond offering naive presumptions suggesting people are good and will not abuse the power, or how knowing details of everyone’s activities may be beneficial to an individual or company because while that may be true they do not address the social good.
And the only thing we use in these discussions is reason, let's not make it personal.