[hyperplane]

You think your cognitive dissonance is bad? You're heaps ahead of where the people that "don't care" are. I try to evangelize privacy to friends and family all the time, and 60-80% of the time I am written off or ignored.

Most people don't seem to want to accept the fact that something terrible may ever happen to them, and will gladly drown out the pain of dealing with a potential future threat to prolong happiness in the short-term. How's that for dealing with cognitive dissonance? After all, the easiest way to remove the dissonance is to render the counterargument false without resorting to reason that might shake your emotional foundations.

As for your own cognitive dissonance: I don't believe that you are death, destroyer of worlds, by default just because you have the ability to build technology, no more so than a man with the capacity to develop firearms is by default a murderer. Improve the human condition, engineer systems toward that goal, and just pay more attention to the question of "what would somebody evil possibly use this product for?" and try to mitigate against the evil bits.

If you are terrified of ever having unintentionally built a weapon, then it is best not to be an engineer at all, as nearly every tool can be weaponized in the right environment with some degree of effectiveness by someone that means harm.

[Jupe]

I have the same issue with the 60-80% - trying to convince others of the deep evil that can (and when there's a bad quarter probably will) be done.

I generally let people know how absolutely permanent this stuff really is... More permanent than a tattoo. The information people put on facebook will, like it or not, outlive your grand kids.

[RougeFemme]

and then there are those engineers who have intentionally built weapons, hoping that they would be only be used defensively, but knowing that's likely not the case. . .