That is not what&#x27;s typically meant by surveillance.<p>Sure, it turns out using centralized web services has helped the government with things such as PRISM, but that doesn&#x27;t mean we should blame people for those development practices rather than the government.<p>Prior to PRISM, pretty much any reasonable person would assume that the blobs you store in S3 aren&#x27;t going to be looked at anyone or, worst case, metadata will be seen by AWS employees for debugging stuff.<p>What we have done is make things a ton better for developers; we can make things quicker and more easily which empowers society&#x2F;humanity. The fact that it&#x27;s incidentally contributed to a surveillance society through no intent of the developers in a way you wouldn&#x27;t reasonably expect does not make the developers culpable.<p>It is true that customer data is trusted with a lot of services-of-services nowadays, but do you want to go back to the stone age where the only people who can store anything must run their own hardware with their own databases and so on?<p>The right thing to do here is to call for better use of encryption where possible and, for surveillance issues, to reign in the unreasonable government programs that make this practice result in such problems.