Comment by deltaprotocol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deltaprotocol | Hacker News Reader

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This is why I believe we are the root cause. We, developers and tech aware. Your mentioned 1%.

This isn't about agencies or governments or even corporations anymore. It's about our work ethics. Developer ethics.

We babble around the internet about all the things we defend, but we don't even try not to embed Analytics in our clients websites.

We fear for the future, for the abuse of the technological systems, yet those under the dark robe of the NSA and others are readers of this same vehicle. They are here.

People call RMS radical and so many other things, but isn't history proving him right in many of his deviations? Heading for total disaster, yes we are.

We, the ones who built and delivered computers and the internet to the world, are doing a job for corporations and not for users. If you're paid, you put your tail between your legs and comply.

This is about changing our developer attitude, our developer community. Maybe only we understand the battlefield, but still the fight is our hands now. We must protect those we love and those we have never met. We must stand up and fight the fight for them, just the way we expect a doctor to have built the knowledge and to act ethically when taking care of us, just like we expect a civil engineer to build stuff with quality and respect for our well being, we must also act honorably like that, even if it means we loose money.

The developer community, hidden behind screens, have been bought by the big man money, and act to the people as blind policemen throwing bombs at the demanding population.

I think you're right, on all points, but that leaves us deeply screwed.

I can try to dissuade my boss from putting in the 33rd analytics gizmo on our site, but they are remembering the sales pitch and all that lovely data. If I say no they'll ask someone else in the office, few more times I'll be needing a new job.

It's interesting you mention doctors and engineers, two professions that have more accountability and two well subscribed professional bodies. If doctors were being asked to surveil patients or report something, as governments will occasionally suggest, the BMA will shout rather loudly. The press listen, write up a piece with suitably scary headline, and the govt changes mind (usually).

The IET (UK Engineering body) has double the global membership of the BCS (computing) which is in far more countries. I'm going to hazard a guess there's more in tech than engineering.

I'm not aware of any tech or professional bodies that attract anything but a tiny minority. We can't blacken the web like the Googles and Facebooks can in the face of stupidity like SOPA. Without some group body we're left with signing change.org and blogging. If we don't take a job there's millions who will - FB and Google are in the top 5 best places to work, yet are part of the problem.

> I can try to dissuade my boss from putting in the 33rd analytics gizmo on our site, but they are remembering the sales pitch and all that lovely data. If I say no they'll ask someone else in the office, few more times I'll be needing a new job.

If someone does something morally wrong, it is not made morally acceptable by the possibility that someone else might have done it. Justifications that use the kind of reasoning “If I had not done it, someone else would have done it.” come most often from people who might lose something (or not gain something) from doing the morally acceptable thing. I suspect it is just selfishness that makes people cling to such justifications, no matter how weak those are.

Mass data is an all consuming fire. People want the fire. The fire is warm. It enables higher quality, more advanced tech. Every existing developer in the world could stop writing a single line of analytics or big data code, but the fire would still rage on. New developers would rise up. The allure is too great.

We can only hope to find a way of managing and containing the fire before it causes too much damage. Some days I'm more optimistic, other days I fear for the next 100 years. We are now a post-big-data society -- it's one of those paradigm shift technologies that can't be undone.

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