system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is there such a thing as a Union of Concerned Programmers?

When it became apparent that nuclear weapons might destroy mankind, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was started to educate the world and preferrably try to stop the whole thing.

When it dawned on earth scientists that antropogenic climate change _is_ destroying our human habitat, the Union of Concerned Scientists was formed to try and turn things around.

Are we as programmers organizing somewhere to stop Big Data, or poorly thought-out software in service of the public, or ill-secured software in general, or social networks hijacked for nudging whole nations, from fucking civil society up for good?
gpt
Almost a year ago, Google shut down Google Plus. During this time, some kind of weird mistake happened that took YouTube down for several hours. The combined screaming of the general population was loud enough to get E.T.'s parents to come pick him up.

I guess people say they want good security but they don't want outages that are necessary to apply a great deal of these security fixes, many of which are not backwards compatible with less secure versions of the software for obvious reasons, so you can only go forward, and if you make a mistake, oh well. Shoddy security is going to be a problem so long as people continue to have unrealistic expectations about the availability of websites. Now maybe Google is a bad example because they can clearly manage it just fine--but most companies don't. The joke about how the backend is held up by duck tape, spit, and prayers is pretty much true for most smaller companies (as well as some larger ones), particularly marketing and affiliate companies which are the ones to have the most digital fingerprinting data.

So the first hurdle to overcome would be convincing the customer that not being able to unsubscribe from an emailing list for several hours is worth some kind of a guarantee that their e-mail address won't be stolen. You'll find that a far harder sell than programmers who want to implement better security.