&quot;Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.&quot;<p>No, we don&#x27;t.<p>We have probably a few hundred doing hard-core surveillance. We have another few thousand functioning as enablers by making social media and ad networks really attractive. We have a whole lot of <i>non-</i>engineers insisting on placing ads and tracking on their websites.<p>And then there&#x27;s the mass bulk of software engineers that have nothing to do with it, and nothing they do will stop it.<p>50% of doctors decide to stop doing something, and it gets noticed. 99% of software engineers decide to take enormously strong stands against surveillance even at great personnel cost, and surveillance continues on as if nothing happened, except maybe those who work on it get paid a bit more to make up for decreased supply.<p>It may, in that weird 20th&#x2F;21st century fashionable-self-loathing way, feel really good to blame the group you&#x27;re a part of, but basically what you&#x27;re proposing won&#x27;t do anything at all. You&#x27;re imputing to &quot;software engineers&quot; in general abilities they don&#x27;t collectively have. You&#x27;ve got to attack it at the demand level, you will <i>never</i> be able to control the supply. This also matters because if you waste your energy with that approach, you might decide you&#x27;ve done something about the problem and stop trying when in fact you&#x27;ve done nothing.