It is Google’s fault for creating a product that can be abused in such a way that would allow for these outsized and egregious invasions of individual privacy
In every other engineering discipline you are required to understand the impacts and uses of what you build.
This is what an “environmental impact study” is - and despite what people might think of how they are used - the core purpose and reason they are key to engineering is because second and third order effects are real, impactful and frankly mitigation costs a lot.
Unfortunately, we never actually developed such a practice in software development outside of cases where hard engineering was leading such as in defense, nuclear or other very highly regulated, lethal, or martial industries.
In every other engineering discipline you are required to understand the impacts and uses of what you build.
This is what an “environmental impact study” is - and despite what people might think of how they are used - the core purpose and reason they are key to engineering is because second and third order effects are real, impactful and frankly mitigation costs a lot.
Unfortunately, we never actually developed such a practice in software development outside of cases where hard engineering was leading such as in defense, nuclear or other very highly regulated, lethal, or martial industries.