We are long past time for real professional ethics in our professions.
If we are so bold as to claim the title "engineer," where are our obligatory professional standards? Our licensure? Our - gasp - liability?
If a structural engineer designs a bridge in a way that ignores established best practices, and the bridge fails and causes injuries, the engineer is held responsible.
Why are our professions different?
Largely because of the industrial exemption. The liability you want is already absorbed by employers. The only thing that industrial exemption doesn't apply to is structural designs. I see no reason to treat software any different than chips or automobiles, so I don't really think it would change much. Certainly we wouldn't hold network engineers personally liable for outages or whatever else you have in mind.
The principle is the same: If your job functions at layers 4-7 in the OSI model, don't create software that does something terrible with personal data for financial gain, and if your job concerns OSI layers 1-3, don't fuck with the Internet.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/harvard-works...
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/the-spark-guide-to-life-episo...
But an ethics course is mostly CYA for the company.
Do we say that engineer is unethical, and that he should never have participated?