Engineers are people who come in all ethical flavors. I used to know one whom I consider evil, in the actively, knowingly malicious sense. I've known a whole lot more who generally just don't think about these questions.

Thinking knowledge, intelligence or capability correlates with ethics is a category error.

It's more an industry error, I suspect. The University I went to forced all the Software Engineers to do some of the traditional Engineering papers, including courses on ethics. The professional institute that accredits the University's ability to call their course an Engineering course required those courses.

Courses like that don't fix unethical people, but they make the rest of us aware that ethical concerns exist. Software/Computer Science is such a young discipline that, industry-wide, I don't think we've learnt that one from the other industries yet.

I question the amount that such ethics courses actually help. Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine, and yet you don't have to go far on HN (even in this very thread) before you see people saying business majors are unethical.

The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying that it helps people avoid spam, or get better advertisements, or whatever, and then the engineers think they are being ethical and beneficial to society by building these systems.

> Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine

I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)

Not that I minded personally, but it was a strong lesson to me that teaching people categories and how to think won’t give them a desire to respect any particular brand of morality.

> this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)

To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.

> To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.

Yes, it's just that we've only recently been allowed to talk about it openly.

This crosses into political flamewar and personal attack, which you can't do on HN, regardless of how right you are or how righteous your cause.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? We'd appreciate it.

Impartial view here, not entirely sure where I fall on free speech:

You've concluded that the absolute morality expressed by public consciousness should be the arbiter of publicly expressible speech. Maybe the next thing that gets people killed is not allowing public discourse to challenge socially accepted, morally unacceptable beliefs.

> what arguments exactly do you feel could not legally be expressed in a modern first-world democracy, that actually should be expressed?

Many people use “free speech” to describe more than what is covered by the First Amendment in the USA. For instance, freedom from retaliation, by being fired from your job. According to that view, entities other than the government can engage in suppressing free speech.

I read the argument and then re-read it. Went through few odd stages of amusement and I still disagree. Defending Nazi right to express free speech is more necessary now than ever given that people apparently forgot what an important right it is.

As for the argument that, opinion gets people killed, I can only reply with the following.

Opinions don't kill people. People kill people. It is important to know the difference.

I totally agree, nuclear bombs don't kill people, people kill people. There is no reason people should be unable to build their own weapons and bombs. And don't even start with the WMD slippery slope.

More seriously, limiting speech should not be necessary in a good society were people don't let such stuff spread. But that doesn't seem to be how humans work. The marketplace of ideas does not necessarily prevent bad outcomes. And pretending that a root cause analysis for a genocide doesn't include speech as a vital segment in the chain leading to that atrocity seems illusory to me.

So yes, having reasonable rules doesn't seem that wrong to me. It certainly comes with all the usual problems of gov/regulation. I'm kind of fine with what we have here in Germany. Not that its perfect... but it kind of reminds me of that saying about aerospace rules... they are written in blood.

It is a good argument. It sounds reasonable. But having 'reasonable rules' is a vague statement. It is something akin to me saying in a corporate meeting 'it is all about balance'.It is and it conveniently can be applied to anything.

For the record, I personally dislike German approach despite understanding its genesis.

I can't really speak for aerospace rules, but I am not certain they say that much about speech.

edit. I just remembered. Internet has all manner of rather dangerous information out there. Materials may be highly difficult to procure, but knowledge is still at your fingertips.

Saying that business majors are full of unethical people is like saying that politics is full of unethical people, it is the job that attract those characteristics.

The objective of those ethical classes is to move the neutral/good majority in hope in hope to counterbalance the unethical minority.

And computer science is just as full of unethical people. The highest paying jobs available to those in their 20s and 30s, by far, are computer science jobs. That alone attracts an incredible amount of people only in it for the money.

On top of that, companies which are usually regarded as some of the most unethical companies on the planet (especially in regards to privacy) are companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which are worshipped by and have computer science people scrambling to get hired by them. Going back a little further in history, before FAANG, the companies that were revered by the tech world were the very same ISPs that this post is railing against.

Programmers as a whole seem to have no problem at all being unethical as long as it gets them either money or the chance to work on the latest tech fad.

I do not disagree with this, but it stands that the presence/prevalence of unethical people is not really an argument against ethic courses, as they are meant to do little more that containing the problem

Unless you imagine some sort of industry-wide reckoning from a political/legal perspective, the industry will probably never "grow up". This isn't the sort of industry where a couple bridges might fall down and everyone suddenly gains self-awareness that it's time to be a little more adult.

Just look at the resistance on this forum to the idea of GDPR or data privacy bills. This is one of the most self-aware forums on the internet and still probably a majority of users are not only aware of who (and what) is signing their paychecks, but they actively endorse it in their personal discourse during their time off too.

What do you mean? There's a whole genre of reasonably talented morally bankrupt "whitehats" building passivedns mass surveillance infrastructure.

Cisco collects more than 24TB of DNS query data every day. Here's a Cisco employee demonstrating the kinds of horrifying analytics they perform on this data https://www.first.org/resources/papers/conf2018/Mahjoub-Dhia...

Wow, that is amazing. Is Cisco telling their clients they're doing this? That's a lot of root servers too.

This surveillance is mostly targeted at residential users. I’m sure they mention this in some opendns legalese, but they definitely don’t openly advertise this.

In countries or locations with a nearly nonexistent tech industry, your employment options as a software engineer may be limited to that kind of crap

To make money on analytics?

He is speaking of the developers and engineers who have the technical expertise and should know it's a bad idea but still agree to implement it regardless of their moral compass.

I've worked on questionable projects at a big telecom. I refuse to run ISP provided modems/routers at home, i refuse to use my isps dns and use dns-tls etc etc based on what i have seen.

The devs have often said things bad idea and raise concerns unfortunately you generally have no power, the decision to implement something is made above you. Generally the people making the decisions know things are questionable but you need to make your KPIs / get promoted / earn more money for the company etc etc.

If you don't follow a direct order and refuse to work on a piece of work in reality you will be fired.

That leaves you with the option of looking for a new job yourself or being forced to find a new job as you was kicked out.

While some people can take the moral highground, outright refuse and resign, others have to deal with life issues such as paying the bills and supporting a family which makes it extremely hard to pick a fight refusing to do something. We do not like to think it but we are just another cog in the wheel and dispensable.

Nice point. I've been considering changing my router for a while out of privacy concerns. Do you have a suggestion? I was wondering whether i could use my raspberry pi 3b+ for it.

I've been using Mikrotiks for over a decade, they just work and are pretty cheap. They do require you to know a little bit more about networking then the regular, end user oriented, routers.

Only negative I would mention is that some things are a little bit harder to setup, like a VPN for example (and it doesn't support OpenVPN over UDP).

Why the implication that devs/engineers who have such technical expertise "know it's a bad idea"? There are plenty of devs and engineers who would have no moral issue with mass data collection and analytics. You don't magically become a paragon of morality just because you got a CS degree. Just ask Zuckerberg.

I’m working at a company and they want to do a massive amount of logging from our companies IOS app. Basically log everything in the name of security. I made the statement today what does legal think about the data we would be now storing? It has user locations, gps coordinates, all the other fun stuff you can get from a users phone. They all looked at me like I was crazy for even asking that question. And I don’t think a single person in the room the devs included had even though about the personal data we were going to be able to collect. And if we SHOULD be collecting it.

If your company does business in the EU, or has users within the EU then the GDPR kicks in.

The legal department would care about that.

To be fair Zuckerberg didn’t get a CS degree. Your point still stands of course.

To be even more fair, I feel pretty sure Zuckerberg would be happy to agree that "you don't magically become a paragon of morality just because you got a CS degree".

I’m not sure why anyone cares about Zuckerberg’s opinions on morality. The point that a CS degree does not impart a higher moral code is not controversial. My comment only pointed out that Zuckerberg was a bad example because he doesn’t have a CS degree.

And my comment pointed out that your parent comment didn't present Zuckerberg as an example, but as a source of support.

(Does that make sense? No, he'd make more sense as an example. But that's not what the comment said.)

Yes, I see now, thanks for pointing that out. The implication being Zuckerberg relies on people with CS degrees even if he himself does not have one.

Google and FB are doing the same thing with their data (and worse) and the engineers they employ don’t seem to care that much, even though they are pretty smart.

There are many different kinds of capitalism

Seriously browse through the who's hiring thread... some engineers may see it as an easy way to get their foot in the door in the data analytics industry. Hopefully they just focus on bettering their portfolio.

There are environments where traffic must be logged for regulatory or other legal reasons, so the technique and code to implement it is not universally malicious.

Implementing the mis-feature on a public ISP will be done by people who think the matter isn't worth risking their job by taking a stand on, and just saying no once the decision has been made several levels above their rank won't help anyone because if they don't implement the feature their replacement will.

> I wonder why someone who knows how to do any of that, would think it is a good idea or go along with implementing that

The age-old answer: money.

The nasty dilemma that capitalism poses is that of "take the moral high ground" vs "know whether I'll afford rent next month". It's not your moral compass that determines your worth to society, it's how much people are willing to pay you for your work. If they aren't, you are worth so little to society that you may be out of a home.

Developers may be in a pretty sweet situation, generally, but if you don't have money saved or another job lined up you don't have much choice.

I also think that people are great at finding excuses for what we're doing. I've read somewhere about a hypothesis that conscious thought is mostly just intellectual justification for subconscious urges.

> I wonder why someone who knows how to do any of that, would think it is a good idea or go along with implementing that

Modern silicon valley is built off people implementing similar pervasive tracking, without it there is no google, facebook and many other startups. Not to mention online newspapers and everyone who makes money indirectly from the tracking.

I agree it's a bad thing, but that ship sailed long ago and things like the GDPR are only just starting to bring it back.

It's probably not for them:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveill...

Personally I have absolutely zero qualms with implementing any system to collect mass analytics. I just don’t give a shit, at these scales users are cattle.

given the volume of data, i don't care as much on an individual level since each person is a drop in an ocean, but knowledge is power, and this is too much knowledge for ISPs, advertisers, and government agencies.