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It's not a simple blame game. Whomever controls the product definition rules the roost.

E.g. good luck trying to be a developer at Microsoft 10 years ago in Balmer's 'embrace, extend, extinguish' model

That is to say, it's organisational dna that dictates who defines the product. Once the 'specs' have been written, hands are tied.

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It’s actually very simple: anyone who makes a living from working on this product owns a share of the blame. Nobody in this industry can claim to have their hands tied; it’s not difficult for folks talented enough to land a job at Google to instead find work that doesn’t involve violating privacy at web scale. If you write code or participate in meetings intended to execute on a corrupt vision then you are tainted.

I disagree. Specifications require implementation, and the implementation literally comes out of the engineers' fingers - if none of the engineers agreed to implement something they thought was unethical, then it's mostly irrelevant what the product definition says.

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