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.
No, we don't.
We have probably a few hundred doing hard-core surveillance. We have another few thousand functioning as enablers by making social media and ad networks really attractive. We have a whole lot of non-engineers insisting on placing ads and tracking on their websites.
And then there's the mass bulk of software engineers that have nothing to do with it, and nothing they do will stop it.
50% of doctors decide to stop doing something, and it gets noticed. 99% of software engineers decide to take enormously strong stands against surveillance even at great personnel cost, and surveillance continues on as if nothing happened, except maybe those who work on it get paid a bit more to make up for decreased supply.
It may, in that weird 20th/21st century fashionable-self-loathing way, feel really good to blame the group you're a part of, but basically what you're proposing won't do anything at all. You're imputing to "software engineers" in general abilities they don't collectively have. You've got to attack it at the demand level, you will never be able to control the supply. This also matters because if you waste your energy with that approach, you might decide you've done something about the problem and stop trying when in fact you've done nothing.
Yup. And the magic of digital content, software being a kind of it - it's infinitely copyable. It takes one guy to write a surveillance package and open-source it or have their company sell it, and everyone can now use it.
It's not engineers who make the decision to use surveillance technology. Hell, for most of the work a software engineer does, most of the data coming from surveillance tech doesn't even matter.