Companies choosetoencrypt.com sends information to by embedding them in this page:- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Google
"Bbbut, everyone does it. It's industry sop..."
Until we outlaw a way to make money, expecting people to morally not use it to is extremely naive. Something a 5 year old would expect in fact.
There is a reason why we have police, courts and jails after all.
Of course, this works best in an economy where there are a surplus of jobs.
Developers have the power to refuse bad actions, especially like you say in a job-rich environment. But unless software developers experience risk consequences for developing something bad, some number of them will not obey their conscience.
> some number of them will not obey their conscience.
Let's just hope that as time progresses that more will follow their conscience. I honestly think that as our other needs are being taken care of that people are able to act more on their own personal ethics. It is substantially easier to be ethical when you can put food on the table.
I’m still concerned, though... addition to basic security, some people will compromise ethics for status. In particular, an observation JL made in the book is that people staying in the finance industry despite reservations were often parents buying their kids a fancy education.
Abolish Harvard to fix Facebook? Less Eton, more ethics?
I despise Google, Facebook et al and I develop a webpage in my freetime for a club that I'm in. I'll gladly work an extra hour, if it means I can avoid sending data to one of those asshat companies, but it's really not as easy as it sounds.
I for example used a template to base my webpage on and that template creator chose a font, as he should, but then instead of statically embedding the font file, the guy included it by linking to Google Fonts, meaning that all of my users' browsers sent their IP and that they are visiting my webpage (as part of the HTTP Referrer) off to Google.
I found out by looking at my page with NoScript and I suppose, you could find out by looking at the network requests, too, but neither are necessarily something that a hobby webdev is going to look at.
Another time, a module decided to load JQuery off of a Google server. And incidentally, that module was installed by the guy who maintained the webpage before me, so that's another point how "everyone doing it" does actually make it harder on you.
Then we wanted to embed a map. I happened to know of OpenStreetMap, but most webdevs probably don't, because everyone's using Google Maps everywhere.
For videos, I was convinced to embed YouTube-videos, because of networking effects and such, so then I wanted to at least try to make it privacy-friendly and, you know, comply with EU law, so I put up a picture, if you clicked on that picture, it would then load in the actual YouTube player.
I was hoping to find a module that did this automatically. I found one. Exactly one, that is. And it was kind of shitty at that. So, then I had to spend not just one extra hour, but probably rather five, to try to patch that module up into a semi-usable something.
I even thought about creating a place for minimal themes that don’t load remote JS (and don’t do silly stuff like scrollbar hijacking).
Though interestingly the DDG app says "3 trackers blocked" and only shows twitter being blocked.
<a href="//twitter.com/USERNAME"><img src="twitter-dot-png">Find us on twitter</a>
And host twitter-dot-png yourself.
(edited to remove autolinking)