zlacker

>>syness+(OP)
I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance.

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.

>>tobbyb+Bl
One thing people seem particularly blind about is that private companies holding data from their own purposes is the huge point of failure for privacy.

The government can get your gmail, facebook, verizon, amazon data because those companies keep that data about you. The NSA doesn't need to spy on you, google already does. I don't think the NSA is reading my email, but I know Google is.

Not to mention that when all these tech companies are spying on your for profit, your privacy is already destroyed.

>>rhino3+Lm
A lot of people are not blind about this at all.

They understand fully that their data is collected and they expect nothing less than the top result of their Google, Amazon, and Facebook queries to match exactly what they are looking for.

>>chisha+8o
A lot of people have an abstract idea that information is being collected, yes. I suspect that few people realize or know what the amount of information is, who has access to it, what purposes they use it for.

Does anyone remember that angry email they sent 5 years ago where they were criticizing their boss? Google does. What kind of profile can you build from thousands and thousands of such emails, messages and queries, and location data and pictures, videos, actions on social networks?

I think some companies have a better idea about who some people are than those people themselves.

>>blub+Ip
And thanks to this technology, people can understand themselves better, if they choose to. It's truly bizzare that some people instead take away that the right way to "correct" this discrepancy is for companies to know less.

>>caskan+Gk1
Why do you find that bizarre? Given the asymmetry of resources and conflicting interests between people and the companies who know so much about them, it seems perfectly reasonable to want companies to know less. The vast majority of that knowledge is used to take from the consumer, not to give.

>>nitrog+zO1
It's not a zero sum game.

Good companies use information they collect to provide better services. Bad companies use it to rip people off. The problem of bad companies doing bad things is independent of companies having information about people.

>>caskan+by2
The arguments for information control are similar to those for anything else -- less [x] floating around, less potential for abuse.