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.
Which sector is building startup after startup for data mining, tracking, building profiles? This in addition to the already established companies. Then you're trying to downplay the issue to trivial actions such Facebook likes or tracking of IP addresses, a toy version of the state of the art. Finally, the sarcasm, showing how reasonable you are and putting the OP in a bad light for not being "more understanding".
It's quite simple: the topic of privacy is central to a free society and it's enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the past, we have seen a rich history of abuses, lies and deceit from huge organizations with massive resources at their disposal. Private or not.
The majority of people go on with their lives without caring, as long as they have their basic needs met. The very few that take a stand, pay the price. Otherwise, some criticism of the behavior of these organizations can be found online, but not much because of:
1) Chilling effects. Funny how I had to think before posting this message, living comfortably in a democratic country, with freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
2) "Helpful people", quick to jump to the defense of said organizations, explaining away abuses, making up excuses, muddying the waters, asking for fairness and understanding their point of view.
So thanks for keeping the balance karmacondon. They might have mountains of money, lawyers, shills, PR people and most resources imaginable really, BUT we wouldn't want to unfairly hurt their feelings. I do apologize for that.
You talk about it like it's necessarily a bad thing, by default, for everyone. Why?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the above events are unlikely though. When a few actors have access to the information of tens of thousands to billions of people though, this has an impact on a societal level. As jaquesm said, information is power and when one has so much information and lots of money to boot, they can begin to covertly influence policy and behavior and harass and marginalize their opponents. And they can do that directly, or by using the information of a third party, like a doctor, lawyer, religious leader, or even someone insignificant which happens to be a relative, etc. Moreover, companies can be sold, together with their databases, they can be forced to hand them over or they can be hacked. A treasure trove of data held by an otherwise principled company, might end up in the hands of an unsavory party.
Why is this a bad thing? History has shown again and again how such imbalances of power are abused. Here's a rather harmless example of data mining a mobile device + social network combined with social engineering to scam people out of money: http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-... If a game producer can do this, what are the pros doing?
Don't you see any logical problems with this line of reasoning?
There is only one positive outcome of concentrations of power, and that is efficiency in execution. Which is extremely scary when combined with huge power.
This is really just the democracy discussion with different terms. It is well known that dictatorships are much more efficient at executing their plans. The inefficiency we voluntarily introduce when establishing and maintaining a democracy (and if you have ever been involved in democratic decisionmaking, the inefficiency can be really frustrating) is the price we pay to insure us against the efficient abuse of power as we have witnessed it countless times in human history.