How many similar practices actually get discovered? In a way this is the "right" thing to do in a capitalist society. We are incentivising this behaviour by making it profitable. An honest company cannot compete with a company doing this, unless very rigorous regulations and enforcement of them. This gets harder and harder as tech gets more opaque.
Adding more regulation, auditing, hoping that _all_ entrepreneurs are honest, are crutches trying to patch a fundamentally broken economical system.
If capitalism were a software, we would call practices like this code smell. We can try patching it up with some specific legislation and (costly) enforcement by e.g. code auditing in this case. But the real issue is that our economy is not optimizing for global (national) utility, it is optimizing for profits of individual business owners.
If capitalism were a software, we would call practices like this code smell. We can try patching it up with some specific legislation and (costly) enforcement by e.g. code auditing in this case. But the real issue is that our economy is not optimizing for global (national) utility, it is optimizing for profits of individual business owners.