If engineers would refuse to implement privacy invasions, they wouldn't happen. Do you work for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time-Warner, CenturyLink, Charter, Cox, Frontier? Don't implement these things. Don't do deep packet inspection, don't log things that shouldn't be logged, don't put in MITM proxies and don't insert cookies in traffic that your customers expected to have unmolested. Explain your decision, and explai…
> If engineers would refuse to implement privacy invasions, they wouldn't happen. That'll never work, as long as it's just a personal ethical thing. There's always someone who would rather take the money. Now, if there was a professional organization or union with some teeth, which could enforce some kind of ethical code, then maybe "engineers" could do something about stuff like this. I'm not sure how it would work…
So true
>Now, if there was a professional organization or union with some teeth, which could enforce some kind of ethical code, then maybe "engineers" could do something about stuff like this.
That won't work either. A few years ago most of the "programmers/developers/computer scientists" I worked with (we weren't pretending to be engineers yet), all had C-S degrees (either C-S undergrad or math/physics undergrad with C-S masters+). And by and large these people were usually members of the ACM or IEEE.
Now with the rise of the "self tough (software) engineer", these professional organizations are weaker than ever before. My cube make is not only likely to be a boot camp graduate, they are likely to not know what the ACM is, never mind any ethical standards its has and of course have no concern for being kicked out.
Now I am not saying all this is good or bad, democratization of technology has pros and cons. But its a shift that makes depending on professional orgs more worthless than ever before. (some of this is also coast vs inland US, the west coast as always had more self-tough vs academia tought programmers).