Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance.<p>We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically.<p>Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.<p>What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90&#x27;s and produced one Snowden.<p>That&#x27;s a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate.<p>The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.