"For instance, machine learning is now widely used for surveillance and advertising in ways that violate basic presumptions about privacy rights."
Those same mathematical techniques are also being used to more accurately detect cancer in MRI scans. Saying everyone needs to be held responsible for second order effects is unrealistic and ultimately damaging to society. Blaming the toolmaker for things they cannot control will only cause no tools to be made.
To me it points to a larger issue in our society that we are on a trend of completely removing context. Context no longer matters, what matters are the effects, regardless of whether you can reasonably be held accountable for them or not. It is thought-crime induced by those who in the same breath rail against that totalitarian behavior and then skip to implementing a version of it themselves.
A number of people on this thread immediately jump to the argument on surveillance and data privacy which is a useful discussion but tangential to what is being proposed in the original article. The article is moral hand-wringing with zero clarity or practicality. And the judge of who is culpable or not is left to a hysterical press, driven by a hysterical and sometimes uninformed public.
Look at what this behavior has done to political (and personal) discourse. Now imagine it being applied to science. No thank you.