CS is a field that hasn’t encountered consequences
I love the narrative this starts off with!<p>But, solutions... I don&#x27;t see how professional ethics could actually be applied productively. And I say this as someone with an engineering background.<p>If a company&#x27;s business is building bridges, ethics are an orthogonal concern and hence relatively straightforward to apply. But how could a civil engineer productively apply their ethics to a company who&#x27;s business it is to build concentration camps? Making sure corners aren&#x27;t being cut doesn&#x27;t really address the problem! If it is just one company building camps in a far off land, then sure a review board can apply judgment and sanction their employees from the rest of the industry. But if your domestic society shifts to where building camps is an upstanding economic sector...<p>Essentially all of the funding for consumer software is based on the assumption of surveillance, period. Low marginal costs means investors desire home runs. Metcalfe&#x27;s law means the introductory price has to be free. Success means users end up locked in - so even if the consumer-facing front end manages to be profitable on its own, the back end is still able to add to profit through surveillance, or at least store everything until they figure it out.<p>Even business sectors that should be outside sources of non-surveillance development seem to prefer sitting on the sidelines. For example, it would be pretty straightforward for banks to start offering direct public APIs for customer access to accounts, letting users choose which software they&#x27;d like to trust with such data. And then even, as an outside authority, putting restrictions on service providers about data retention. But instead the banks stonewall, and so we get surveillance-service providers like Yodlee filling the gap.<p>I don&#x27;t really have solution per se. On a different day I&#x27;d go on about end-user Free software. But that&#x27;s clearly outcompeted for the reasons listed above. When is the last time you saw a GNU TV commercial?