We need something like a Hippocratic Oath for IT professionals.

We might need it but it's of course impossible given how easy it is even for a child to get started in professional IT.

Have a software equivalent of the AMA, have licenses to practice, and that’s solved.

Not even close. There is Tor, there is Bitcoin. Also do you realise how much would this ruin IT?

It would ruin the “Wild West” and it’s about god damned time.

It would do nothing about the "wild west", it'd just make it even worse. And no, there is zero reason why such a regulation would be justified.

Make it worse how exactly..? Big public companies will be chastised if they don't hire certified practicioners. With the huge amount of sensitive data we process as developers, it's only logical that we are going to need licensing in developed countries sooner than later.

Imagine if anyone would be able to practise as a lawyer, financial advisor or even a doctor without accreditation. It'd be a huge controversy.

How would regulation and self-policing make things worse? And really zero reason? That sounds like an ideological rather than a rational position to me.

> How would regulation and self-policing make things worse?

Imposing whimsical and arbitrary barriers to entry that have zero to do with technical hability solves nothing, and its absolutely ridiculous how you present that as solution to the problem of someone having developed highly technical software that you happen to not like.

Unfortunately, ethics is not a course taught in most college majors, and is virtually non-existent in public schools.

Is it not? Every major at my STEM uni was required to take an ethics course. Sometimes multiple, depending on the field.

I graduated relatively recently, and only had to take one- it turned out to be a semester long "piracy is bad" course.

Ethics courses don't make anyone more or less ethical. If lectures were any effective in shaping anyone's moral compass, church services wouldn't happen so often.

>How can any self-respecting programmer at FB work on a project like this?

You mean like the hundreds who work on Deep packet inspection technology?

Catch child predators and terrorism seems like a probable rationalisation.

For money. Most people do a job to make money so they can take care of their family etc. Facebook tends to pay pretty well.

Well then will FB work ? Which part of FB is respected ?

Google does it too. It kicks in when you are on public wifi if you opt in. It's a vpn app at the end of the day that's optional. I don't see much reason for all the outcry. Assuming a majority of the web moves to https soon (going by the chrome roadmap), you are only giving second order data like dns to the vpn or isp. And I don't see much reason to trust isps more than Google/FB.