Agreed. I think I have an explanation (a partial one, at best). The tech world is so adept at abstraction that we have made it one of our primary tools in the b

Agreed. I think I have an explanation (a partial one, at best). The tech world is so adept at abstraction that we have made it one of our primary tools in the box. Everything gets abstracted away until we have a nice, clean, uniform representation of the underlying item. Whether that item is people, vehicles, road accident data or private communications doesn't really matter any more once it is abstracted. Then it's just another record. Ethics and other moral angles no longer apply, after all, how could those apply to bits, that's for 'real' engineers. It's also at the core of the HN "'no politics', please." tenet. I see a similar deficiency in the legal profession, they too tend to just focus on the words and the letters and don't actually care all that much about the people.