I wonder why someone who knows how to do any of that, would think it is a good idea or go along with implementing that. The shitbirds who actually want to do this type of thing are not smart enough to execute it.
Thinking knowledge, intelligence or capability correlates with ethics is a category error.
Courses like that don't fix unethical people, but they make the rest of us aware that ethical concerns exist. Software/Computer Science is such a young discipline that, industry-wide, I don't think we've learnt that one from the other industries yet.
The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying that it helps people avoid spam, or get better advertisements, or whatever, and then the engineers think they are being ethical and beneficial to society by building these systems.
I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)
Not that I minded personally, but it was a strong lesson to me that teaching people categories and how to think won’t give them a desire to respect any particular brand of morality.
To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.
Yes, it's just that we've only recently been allowed to talk about it openly.
The objective of those ethical classes is to move the neutral/good majority in hope in hope to counterbalance the unethical minority.
On top of that, companies which are usually regarded as some of the most unethical companies on the planet (especially in regards to privacy) are companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which are worshipped by and have computer science people scrambling to get hired by them. Going back a little further in history, before FAANG, the companies that were revered by the tech world were the very same ISPs that this post is railing against.
Programmers as a whole seem to have no problem at all being unethical as long as it gets them either money or the chance to work on the latest tech fad.
Just look at the resistance on this forum to the idea of GDPR or data privacy bills. This is one of the most self-aware forums on the internet and still probably a majority of users are not only aware of who (and what) is signing their paychecks, but they actively endorse it in their personal discourse during their time off too.
Cisco collects more than 24TB of DNS query data every day. Here's a Cisco employee demonstrating the kinds of horrifying analytics they perform on this data https://www.first.org/resources/papers/conf2018/Mahjoub-Dhia...
The legal department would care about that.
(Does that make sense? No, he'd make more sense as an example. But that's not what the comment said.)
The devs have often said things bad idea and raise concerns unfortunately you generally have no power, the decision to implement something is made above you. Generally the people making the decisions know things are questionable but you need to make your KPIs / get promoted / earn more money for the company etc etc.
If you don't follow a direct order and refuse to work on a piece of work in reality you will be fired.
That leaves you with the option of looking for a new job yourself or being forced to find a new job as you was kicked out.
While some people can take the moral highground, outright refuse and resign, others have to deal with life issues such as paying the bills and supporting a family which makes it extremely hard to pick a fight refusing to do something. We do not like to think it but we are just another cog in the wheel and dispensable.
Only negative I would mention is that some things are a little bit harder to setup, like a VPN for example (and it doesn't support OpenVPN over UDP).
Implementing the mis-feature on a public ISP will be done by people who think the matter isn't worth risking their job by taking a stand on, and just saying no once the decision has been made several levels above their rank won't help anyone because if they don't implement the feature their replacement will.
The age-old answer: money.
Developers may be in a pretty sweet situation, generally, but if you don't have money saved or another job lined up you don't have much choice.
I also think that people are great at finding excuses for what we're doing. I've read somewhere about a hypothesis that conscious thought is mostly just intellectual justification for subconscious urges.
Modern silicon valley is built off people implementing similar pervasive tracking, without it there is no google, facebook and many other startups. Not to mention online newspapers and everyone who makes money indirectly from the tracking.
I agree it's a bad thing, but that ship sailed long ago and things like the GDPR are only just starting to bring it back.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveill...