> My son Atlas is just over nine months old [...] One thing that’s been troubling me, is that he probably wont have [privacy] in his lifetime.
> I write systems that predict the moods in real-time of nearly a million people who are communicating on the internet (HNProfile.com & RedditProfile.com).
Moral bankruptcy at its finest. No one is forcing you to write systems that do this. You can easily make top-tier salaries at companies that value the privacy of their customers.
As a prominent pessimist on this topic, lately I've seen several anecdotal evidence cases where this is actually not that true anymore.
If enough high-level tech talent starts refusing to write such systems then trust me, govts and corps are slowed down and inconvenienced for real. 5 junior programmers can't write software as well as 1 senior.
Sure those orgs might win in the end, but we can delay that "end" with years if not decades. And if they get frustrated by the delays, they'll make a mistake.
You need a phone, car, society to function and live a reasonably high quality of life.
OP has options here and this makes all the difference. No one is forcing him to write deanonymizing software, and he faces no loss in quality of life by finding a job in which he can work on something more ethical, whereas the people in the comic all face a significant loss.
Someone will write the software one way or another. All that OP would achieve by leaving is to increase the price for this specific thing a little bit. Also, insiders like OP always have specific insights into the full extent of the thing they are involved in so they also know really well how bad it is.
The "Hell," being commonly used as "Hey, even I do it!". In that context, it makes perfect sense: the author is showing their own involvement in what they so lament to demonstrate just how dire they see the situation.
I honestly don't see the incongruity. People are hypocrites. All of us, all the time. If only the morally pure could have meaningful conversations, the only people speaking would be infants.
> I write systems that predict the moods in real-time of nearly a million people who are communicating on the internet (HNProfile.com & RedditProfile.com).
Moral bankruptcy at its finest. No one is forcing you to write systems that do this. You can easily make top-tier salaries at companies that value the privacy of their customers.