alt Hacker NewsAt the end of the day, "think of the children" has been an ancient rallying cry that’s used to justify all kinds of bad behavior. Often ironic, as you say.
Also banks were one of the most vulnerable. I’ve often wondered why. My first reaction is "because their code comes from coders who only want to work at a bank," but I don’t want to be unfair. Perhaps it’s "from people comfortable with lots of bureaucracy". Either way, when I was a pentester, banks were one of our main types of clients, and their code was often bad. So it’s doubly ironic to claim banks are exemplars of how to do privacy.
I consulted with several big banks, and while there are some great developers there, on the whole, the devs were largely passionless and were just there for the job. Many of them actively dislike coding, and it really felt like they were just there for the high pay. I think that type of developer really thrives in a move slow, heavy bureuacracy environment where velocity is not something people care about. The high security can be annoying, but everywhere I went they had enough processes and out-sourcing of security to experts and tools that the average dev didn't really have to think about it. On many teams there would be one person or so who (mostly) understood the area they were responsible for and could deliver quickly, but not every team had somebody like that. One thing that I did think was a positive is that (perhaps because of all these things) is that it was a very low-ego environment, and people were generally open-minded about learning new stuff and/or better ways to do things. Overall I really enjoyed working with the people at banks, despite everything taking longer than you would think it should :-)