Seriously, who are the people writing these features? As 'software is eating the world' I think we'll need an ethics board/bar association or something soon.
This seems so unnatural to me, programming is not as close to something like law as people make out. If a company decides to implement fraudulent process, it is the responsibility of the company. Whether that is via software or calling people over the phone or speaking to people in person.
If you want to argue that every person involved in implementing "something" should answer to an ethics board, then your argument goes way way beyond programming. Law is a special case, and they use "legal ethics" which do not attempt to encapsulate some universal ethical code for reality, they are to prevent abuse of the imperfect system that is "the law", the closest thing to that in programming is linting or compiler warnings.
Another comment here also mentioned that consequential actions are abstracted in large companies; group diffusion of responsibility gently removes most bad decisions that would normally make a person think remorsefully about what they’ve done.
Having an ethics board would be a top-down solution. The bottom-up, which I’m more fond of, is releasing literature and material to anyone working in tech about how their work could actually affect their end users; we need to help each other develop more self-awareness of the results of our work instead of the breadth of material about the work itself.
Some people think that Google is evil. Others think that Facebook is evil. Yet thousands of programmers and non-programmers work there, many from HN.
Some think all ads are evil. Others think ads are good because they pay for freely accessible content online.
It's complicated.
Individual actions, not so much. Using a user's 2FA phone number as a way to send menial account notifications or as a means for your profile to be found is evil. Scraping all data on public wireless networks when you're photographing the streets is evil. Sending unsolicited messages to all your contacts without telling you is evil. Making it as hard as technically possible to cancel a membership is evil. Tricking users into upgrading their license using blatantly false information (see Turbotax) is evil. That's not at all complicated.
Gross.
You can also have people who are “I dont want to lose my job by making a big a stink.”
I am not sure people would risk their fincial stability over lying unless said lying would also affect them in other ways