I worked in Computer Science (CS) research for 20 years. Some researchers take privacy concerns seriously, many do not and see it as out of scope or a nuisance. CS is still mostly male and hence most research is done by male grad students. Young males are often fascinated by spy stuff (I know I was) and will orient their research around it. The conferences where they publish papers also reward them for it by publishing their papers, which indicates an acceptance of this kind of research by the community. Similarly I saw lots of grad students who arranged their research around quadcopters. They liked quadcopters and wanted to play with them so they looked for research that could be done with quadcopters. If they could do CS research that involved looking at porn and get it published they'd probably all flock to that. So part of the explanation is human nature, but the fact it is accepted and published shows there is little real critical review of potential misuse of this kind of research. It is also really difficult to invent anything that can not be misused, especially in research involving sensors. A WiFi sensor can monitor your heart rate for health purposes but can also monitor your heart rate to sell you more stuff.
However I've been thinking the same thing for many years, that much of the CS research seems aimed at spying on people. Companies that will be hiring those grad students may also be partly to blame by hiring students who do such research, probably because it fits with their own corporate data collection and analysis practices on their customers. Grad students want jobs after they graduate, and developing spy stuff gets them jobs. The military -wants- spy stuff so they encourage this kind of research.
So the solution seems to be to somehow get more awareness of potential misuse factored into paper reviews, encourage more research on mitigating misuse of new technologies, and getting more women into CS. Unfortunately women seem to be
leaving or not choosing CS more and more lately. Some women may like spy stuff too even though it has historically been more of a male thing, probably due to the military. I'm not sure there is anywhere yet that you could publish research into mitigating misuse of new technology (except privacy research journals). Sometimes there are solutions for classes of sensors, like cameras or microphones. For example, f you have an interesting application based on cameras but recording video would be very privacy sensitive you might be able to only output the processed result and throw away the video data, and a commercial version could be a chip that does exactly that, making misuse of the video impossible.