Nah, it's a by-product of giving people what they want to make money. This sort of issue has been building for a long time. It's based on abundance of resources and availability of choices. As we have more time and money to spend on things, we can make more independent choices and take positions on issues that we didnt even think about before. Essentially, the semi-homogeneous population slowly fragments into smaller and smaller factions that are not geographically constrained (thanks to tech).
If you have engineering or product skills, now is the time to take a hard look in the mirror, inventory your interests and concerns, and figure out how to fight fire with fire.
We need to be proliferating alternative, humanistic, empathetic software in the world and putting it into people's hands. It's easier than ever for us to independently build a wealth of defensive infrastructure for the common people.
We already have the tools. The problem is marketing, FOMO, etc. We can use stuff like Cloudflare restrictive DNS, a Pihole with additonal lists (like social media), a VPN, screen time or app usage timers, etc. Will and self-control are what's lacking.
The problem isn't marketing or FOMO. The problem is the average person barely understands what you just said, and we can't expect them all to become domain experts, especially when many people lack the fundamental research skills and experience needed to intuitively grok these technologies.
We have to use our intelligence and expertise to make applications which take care of users and their privacy, without them needing to suddenly become overnight computer experts. Most of the tooling I see today has (understandably) massive UX issues and is largely relegated to at least the mildly technical.
We need new and open Facebooks, TikToks, calendars, operating systems, etc. which protect and empower people but don't complicate their lives and stress them out, which leads to security and privacy fatigue. Even my current operating system, macOS, is so intensely user-hostile and obfuscated off the happy path, despite being heralded as a champion of human-oriented design.
We need a modern GNU-like organization but focused on building the social/web tooling that most people today are using.
Almost anyone who cares about their privacy should be able to Google how to improve it, find an article about VPNs, and sign up for Nord VPN (pretty user friendly and commercials everywhere). Dive just slightly deeper and you can find information on DNS and set the VPN to use the DNS you were recommended.
Most people don't care enough to even ask the questions. Creating competing services were the value differentiation is privacy (likely at the trade off of cost or quality) is bound to fail for that same reason.
You're proving my point, that users have to be protected by software engineers in the same way that pedestrians know nothing of civil engineering but trust that bridges are safe to walk on, and aren't to blame when they fail. It's not a marketing or FOMO issue, it's a matter of culture within our profession and way of life as engineers.
No, that would be a matter of law. Bridges aren't safe because some group of engineers wants safe bridges. They have to meet safety standards set by the government, the engineers need license issued by the government, etc. If you want privacy, you need to change the law to grant it. Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile. People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers.
Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up. I don't know about you, but in my current country I have absolutely zero representation with the current oligarchy.
> Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile
Market forces and the law are two different things, which one are you arguing?
> People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers
I never suggested anyone pay for anything, this is a straw man argument.
I don't understand your aggressive stance against engineers building better, open alternatives to current offerings. The market is getting hungrier for it, and if a product is genuinely better, "market forces" will do their thing, no run-around needed.
The workflow goes like this -> R&D -> rl testing -> if broken with deaths -> law to prevent it from happening again
But.. it's a chicken-egg problem. Has there been a law for prevention before an incident happened or is the law formulated after something happens?
.. it's naive to think and say
> Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up.
If it were like this, then no house would be destroyed by earth quake like in Turkey somewhen 2-3 years ago - and Turkey did pass a law some 10 years ago to prevent cheap buildings in earth quake areas.
No bridge would've collapse in Germany - the laws in Germany are one of the toughest making construction very expensive.
And there are much more examples in real world that opposes your "Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up."
The problem is no one wants to pay much money for the better quality, if a little less in quality will do similar job. Compare housing and housw building costs in US and western Europe/Germany.
So, your engineers can do the best things and the market decides. .. yes, ma‘am!
All of those examples are irrelevant because we are talking about software, which is much, much different than your physical examples. Get back to me when we can have open source, community-maintained roads and bridges which can be copied, forked and modified to suit anyone's needs.
That's not going to happen with the way tech/algos are exacerbating the divide.