> I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and doesn't treat it as the liability it is.

A lot of that is due to a lack of training. There's two major ways new people come into programming.

1. Go to college, get a computer science or engineering degree.

2. Self taught.

Neither of those prepares you to deal with the ethics of information storage.

I happened to have an entire course on the topic but only because I took an Information Science minor with my Computer Science major. That course wasn't even an optional elective for me otherwise.

A computer science degree trains you for thinking how to do something. It doesn't teach you how to figure if you should do something.

You can be lucky if a college education in CS/SE teaches you about open source licensing, even more so if it deals with privacy in any way.

IMO every SE curriculum should contain a mandatory course looking into historical precedents how information was used in genocides and oppressive regimes (Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic are two of the most obvious examples but there are plenty others).

It's ridiculous how it took Trump to get elected for the liberal techies in my Twitter stream to realise that the US government has the power to do really bad things with all the data FB & friends have been collecting.

What literature did the course provide? I would like to teach myself more too. The lack of any so far in my programme is making me really pessimistic.

If the ability to enumerate targets for holocaust is our concern, then tech companies are a bizarre place to start caring. The institutions we should be attacking are the DMV, voter registration, and the Social Security Administration

Why that? The data collection you're talking about is relatively constrained and transparent - all those institutions have a well-defined range of data they are allowed to collect, using well-known procedures.

On the other hand, the data private organisations collect is not restricted - neither what data is collected, nor how or from who.

If voter registration started to ask for skin color, there would be immediate public outrage. If credit scoring services include skin color as a scoring factor, it's a trade secret...

Why does the subject knowing about it make it any less useful for genocidal purposes?

You pretty much need a state ID or drivers license, which lists your skin color. Political contributions are a matter of public record for anticurruption purposes. Vital records offices are more than sufficient for tracing ancestry. Welfare offices know who is poor and medically needy. Telecoms and the post office knew who you communicated with.

There was more than enough information to mount a holocaust on any of those axes long before the current crop of tech companies.

Different, though: Now its all in one place, stored forever, and in much more detail: your cell phone leaks your location continuously and in real-time, your photos and videos provide detail we are only just learning to harvest, your formerly secret or at least hard to track written communication is now trivial to record and analyze, and with the coming of IoT all this is just getting a bit more minuscule. Future governments seeking for unwanted persons will have an unprecedented dataset to profile whomever they might not agree with.

Again, this worst case scenario may not happen, but the fact that it can, even if only with a small chance, makes this massive data collection totally irresponsible.

Skin colour, religious and sexual preferences ... One can only hope the next dictator shares your lack of imagination.

Also it's a bit of a bizarre argument that tech companies are doing data collection on such a massively intrusive scale, we should really look at the government databases first because they're already more than enough to screw us over with? It's not even a "but they're doing it more!" ...

>(What's the proper word for old data/information before computers)?

Files.

Yep. I also remember hearing "records" in addition to "files" back in "the day". The reason, of course, these terms have come into computing is by analogy with their "old-world" counterparts.

That said, I wouldn't consider it wrong, per se, to call it data or information these days. Strictly-speaking, old files and records do constitute data, whether they happen to be digitized or not.