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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> An engineer can quit if the project is unethical.

Is creating face recognition software unethical? Your answer is not really important, just the fact that different people will classify this differently. I thought it was creepy as f* when facebook started wanting to automatically tag people in photos. But if that's all the tech was for it may well be ethical, if creepy to some. And yet, face recognition is really all that was used in this case - matching up porn images with social media ones.

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A while ago I suggested that engineers could have an ethics code just like lawyers or doctors and the opinion wasn’t very popular (although with no explicitly stated reason). I still don’t see a reason not to have one. If your company is selling your code and software to abusive states and it’s used to persecute journalists (for example) continuing to do that work there is no different than any unethical work from a doctor or lawyer. And software developers have a huge impact on our life these days With their work. It’s reasonable to hold them to higher standards than in the past.

Problem with that is anyone with a little python-fu can hack together something like this without being an "engineer". I could probably do it using "ethical" FLOSS code and I'm pretty far from being employed in the industry. Hell, if I did do something like this and someone complained to my company they'd probably promote me since our IT dept is iffy on the best of days.

Sure, the “home-made” option is hard to regulate in any field. You also can’t stop people from using hone remedies no matter how unethical they are. So you can take it and use it with little recourse.

But I was thinking more at FAANG for example. They could be required to hire “certified ethical” engineers at least on sensitive projects at first. This means that even if the code is out there no coder would implement it in the company’s solution without risking losing the “certification” and the job. Anyone working for the Hacking Team (those guys selling exploits to oppressive governments) should be more or less unhireable especially if all code in a company’s portfolio should be traceable to a specific engineer.

The principle is already in place for other fields. Journalism being the closest probably. It could be made more effective if needed. It’s obvious that something is needed in this direction.

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