I see other comments talking about personal responsibility, but in the case of FB the notion of a company selling their data is too abstract to clearly understand the risks/consequences for many. Should we put no responsibility on corporations to act civilly or at least legally? Should one not have a personal responsibility to engage only with corporate entities that behave civilly/lawfully/etc? I really don't understand this mindset.
Stop complaining, start taking responsibility.
So far as I can tell, this was Facebook exceeding authorized access to a computer system — at scale. If you or I did this, we’d be looking at felony charges.
For instance, if I had a friend whose job it was to design missiles that are used to bomb innocent people (Lockheed-Martin for instance) I would seriously reconsider my friendship with that person. Yes, it's "just their job" but choosing to have a job which requires having such warped ethics would make me reconsider whether I want to continue associating with them.
Nobody is forced to work at such companies. Yes, effectively all companies do things which we don't agree with on some level (unimaginably large amounts of tax avoidance being the most obvious example). But if a company's ethics are completely antithetical to your own, then I don't see how you could morally justify working for them.
(Obviously there are some understandable exceptions to the above -- the most obvious being that in the US employees are effectively blackmailed into working for their employer because they'll lose their heath insurance otherwise.)
I'm curious what part of the statement is important to you in making that decision though. Is it that LM is part of the military-industrial complex, full stop? That the weapons are used by the US military? That they are sold to and used by other governments? Would LM be acceptable if they created weapons that magically never harmed the innocent? What if they occasionally harmed the innocent but were always used by people with good intentions who were doing things you supported?
Never worked in that industry, just curious.
As for my personal view, it's fairly clear that Lockheed-Martin props up (through lobbying) and profits (through government contracts) from the US war machine -- which in turn has killed millions of innocent civilians. And then there's the contractors that Lockheed-Martin has provided to government agencies to further strengthen the surveillance tools of the NSA, CIA, FBI, and so on. So, I think Lockheed-Martin was a good example of a "clearly immoral" company.
EDIT: You changed your comment after I responded to it. I don't think the ethics of hypothetical magic missiles is a super useful conversation to have (changes in technology don't change our underlying ethics, they just change what ethical questions are being asked).
On the question about unintended consequences, obviously in wars you can't guarantee zero civilian casualties and innocent bloodshed is inevitable (though still unjustifiable). But the US is currently engaged in several illegal wars of aggression (which is a crime under international law) and clearly planning to engage in several more. Personally, I think the "unintended consequences are inevitable in war" defense isn't available to you if the war itself was illegal from the outset.
"Suppose you were bereft of morals, and suppose you were working at Facebook; but I repeat myself."