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This is where the free market system falls apart. It has no opinion on ethics, only profits. Companies are put together to produce, market and sell surveillance
by throw2016 8y ago
This is where the free market system falls apart. It has no opinion on ethics, only profits. Companies are put together to produce, market and sell surveillance tech to schools, corporates, communities, the police and even nation states.
Individual ethics are meaningless beyond signalling against a system. Individual components may have ethical concerns but the system is incentivized to grow and it has.
Imagine walking into a group of sales or engineering folks celebrating a new deal or release at a restaurant and berating them on 'surveillance and ethics'. That shows you the dissonance of your expectation and the disconnect of ethical concerns from businesses. And the impotence of individual ethics in a system.
The only thing that can counter this are explicit laws against this kind of damaging behavior and rule of law. Individuals are not allowed to do whatever gets them profit, they have to operate within ethical constraints, to advocate businesses not operate in an ethical context and to leave everything to markets is advocating lawlessness. And the system does respond in some cases like in drones, 3d printing of guns. Those are not free for all. Surveillance is a failure of regulation.
- hazz99 8y agoI strongly disagree. Regulation and a free market can definitely coincide, we don't have to be so absolutist in our economic opinion. Similarly, a nation having welfare and universal healthcare doesn't mean they're communist. It's not one-or-the-other. Europe has a much freer market than the US, and also has much stronger protections on personal privacy, a la GDPR. > Individuals are not allowed to do whatever gets them profit, they have to operate within ethical constraints, to advocate businesses not operate in an ethical context and to leave everything to markets is advocating lawlessness. Most Libertarian thought espouses this belief, and they are all-in on capitalism. Capitalism != immorality You likely believe this from examining the behavior of US companies. The US market is not very "free" at all - it is heavily regulated, with the government propping up unethical, failing, non-innovative corporations.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago> This is where the free market system falls apart. It has no opinion on ethics, only profits. "We won't sell this technology to anyone who wants to use it to oppress people even though we could make a huge amount of money doing so" seems to suggest otherwise.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- insickness 8y agoThat keepaway strategy doesn't work for guns. There's no reason it should should work for other technologies.
- Pfhreak 8y ago[Citation needed]