The growing impact of automated process in all sector of society has been studied for a few decades already, but we are coming to an era where the question of the legality and ethic applied to information technology cannot be easily brushed out.
To take simple illustration from science fiction authors, it can be interesting to cross the laws and situation that asimov describe in the robot saga with how different droid are designed employed by the two faction in star war universe.
Especially episode 2 and 3 which depict the rise of the trade confederation with an army of droids, but more generally in star war universe it's easy to see the difference of droids or technology made by the empire or used by the 'rebels'. Even rogue one depict the story of the engineer who built the death star with the backdoor inside and the moral question behind designing technology.
It could be very easy from the star war universe to classify the function of certain droids as being unethical.
Maybe the more common example is the imperial probe droids who are present in the whole saga whose main function is to track certain person, and send crypted information about their location to the imperial command.
It's easy to see how in real world most technology of cryptography and tracking are often developed by fascist regims.
It can be then obvious to conclude that any program based on tracking and identifying certain person based on profile or database, and transmit it in a crypted manner to a centralized server in sort that the said person don't know what information is actually stored and sent on them would be only really useful in the context of a fascist regim.
Application like facebook can easily slip to this category of software, made to categorize people based on hidden/non public algorithm, and send them in a crypted manner to a centralized server.
The very fact that they spend good deal of effort to make those data 'secure' between the clients and centralized server show that they are perfectly aware that this information represent a certain value, or a certain power, and the fact that they hide this information to anyone else but themselves show they are intentionally taking this value and power away to a centralized structure.
This information can only be accessed to the person that are registered as right owner on this information via friend list, group or other, but the access to this information still depend entirely on non public algorithm on which they have total control.
Unfortunately, it's very easy to realize when digging the rabbit hole that most informations technology used today originate from a intention of control and power, IBM sold bar code machin to the nazi camp, and maybe it could be said to be the first real case of automatized architecture in the fordist utopian dream of worker city.
First networks were built by secret services, as well as most cryptographic algorithm (DES / GHOST etc).
The opposite faction would be GNU, free software fundation, who tried to balance things out with the idea to have all software developed in collaborative manner with open source and GPL principles, but even linux kernel 2.6 embed Linux SE which was developed by nsa that most linux user and admin have hard time to really grasp.
The other aspect of paternalism / fascism is the concept of 'protection'. In history all the entities who advocated themselves as 'protection' where always feudal regims, or fascist regim who need to protect their population against the evil neightboor.
How much of this thinking is rooted in computer technology ? Actually a lot.
The whole intel 386 multi tasking architecture is based on this idea of memory protection, segmentation, pagination, rings level, and kernel have been built extensively with this paternalist approach to 'protect' the system through a pyramidal attribution of resources and actions that application can do, and all interaction between application or hardware has to go through centralized “ring 0” kernel software, who reside in 'protected' region of memory to 'protect' hardware from application errors.
And the intel concept was still originally developed for the US ARMY, and they even managed the exploit to make them give up on the double sources close which was supposed to be AMD (hence all the bitterness from AMD to intel).
All 'high level' language are based on the paradigm that everything can be 'typed' and that all operation on the data should be determined/judged based on the type, which can easily lead very stereotypical way of thinking about problems, that would be easily categorized as fascist or ultra nationalist if this method of thinking was applied to human society problem.
And this sort of hard categorization and type matching would necessarily be the hearth of the imperial probe droid to match one type of data with record in a database to determine the categorization of the object or person.
Even the principle of CCTV have this sort of ethical problem, because they are storing information about other persons, in a way that the persons can't have access to it, and the way the information is treated and analyzed is totally occult to the general public.
Maybe the more ethical manner could be that CCTV archive would be stored on mobile devices of person who are being filmed.
But the bottom architecture is same thinking than facebook, with collecting valuable information on the population, and keeping a total control on it, with right of exploitation for any end or purpose.
It's very easy to see that company always take great deal of effort to crypt information that are in their interest, like credit card, phone SIM card, social security card, and leave user data most of the time in clear form or under government or other entities control for big brother feature. In this companies fail their customer in a true liberal 'market driven' environment.
The last apect is about the use of cryptography to hide content, and in history, this sort of technology is always used in conjunction with an 'us vs them' mindset, that has been emulated both by americans corporations and communist block, and based on an idea that certains category of person have the right to access this information, and developed by paranoiac minds, especially when it's to hide information about other persons.
Cryptography should only be used in the context of unique information that is either created or biometric, in order to create the concept of 'information ownership', but not by a third party who crypt information between two other party in a way that only the centralized third party have a true cryptographic ownership on this information.
Concept in blockchain that solve these ethical problems imo are :
Node and all data is fungible on the network. There is no way at the network level to distinguish a transaction from another, a node from another, and there is no categorization or tracking/matching that is required for the network operations.
Blockchain are trustless, users control their own private key, and there is no 'trusted third party' who grab the ownership of the information between two party interacting through network. This benefits is mitigiated by the fact that most transaction happen through centralized exchange who retain this feature that the centralized site control the private keys, and the cryptographic ownership of the information. But blockchain node allow to transact between two party without third party.
They only use cryptographic signature software, all the data is public, and nothing is 'hidden' or 'protected by an obscure centralized system' like facebook, banks, and most application made by corporations, who only take power away from user to protect them from their own mistake and irresponsability.
