[li4ick]

I mean, I believe that there should be a Hippocratic Oath in software, but I'm not sure where your particular cutoff bar stands. My view of software is against the mainstream: most programmers should dedicate their time to build tools for scientists, to solve actual problems and advance our species. Current tech is mostly trash, useless and nobody needs it.

[IvyMike]

There is the ACM Code of Ethics, which includes:

> Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.

> Avoid harm.

The document is a lot bigger than the Hippocratic Oath, so includes a lot of points about Professional Responsibilities and Leadership, but at least it's partially aligned with that kind of thinking.

https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

[alexbanks]

It's difficult to know what/where the line is for sure, but I think lots of software has shifted away from making people's lives better. Facebook, Amazon, Uber, are doing more negative for humanity than positive I think. Sure, they offer a service that might not've existed before, at least in that iteration or scale, but at what point are the negatives outweighing the positives?

Sure, you "connect" people to friends/family they may not be able to see in person or communicate with regularly. You're also verifiably playing god with information and misinformation, as well as spying on your users, selling their data to other people that want to spy on them, paying employees to view toxic content (which results in PTSD), etc. Is all this worth being able to communicate with people you don't really care about, or that don't really care about you?

[jentist_retol]

>I'm not sure where your particular cutoff bar stands

I'm not sure either! I'm not an ethics expert. I think the Uber example and the Facebook example are real outliers. They're particularly egregious examples of abuse of people's information (letting people zoom in on people's walks of shame at company parties is definitely bad!).