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.
It's simply hard to take your stance as one made in good faith.
The US government has a long history of using its national police, the FBI, to infiltrate and subvert domestic political movements that the powers that be found unpleasant -- including using their police powers against modern groups such as the Occupy movement.
Further, we know that the US government has used records held by tech companies to create massive cross-referenced databases of people, including domestic activities. The recent leaks about surveillance programs has made that abundantly clear.
Your position is literally that an organization with a history of doing this kind of activity won't use the technology we already know the government possesses to keep doing the same thing.
So I think there is a need for you to rehash the debate here, because it's not clear how you sincerely hold that position.
Because rather than a rational view, what you describe sounds like irrational denial.
I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.
They don't just monitor criminals-- that's why the anti-surveillance folks are anti surveillance! They monitor everyone, and create criminals as needed, and nobody can question them for fear of ending up on the chopping block.
They are currently very far out of hand, and "we the people" are doing somewhere between jack and shit because of how little the people understand the problem.