Don't excuse your peers' actions. Engineers are smart people. They know what they're doing. And C levels aren't putting anything together as a product. They are giving direction and paying others (engineers) to do that.
Everyone involved is to blame (including management), but it is an engineer somewhere that actually makes these things. Devices don't magically start spying because a business person makes a deal. The data doesn't magically end up in the hands of their 500 partners. There are large datastores to scale and integrations that require work to build.
And even if they're never held accountable (I expect they won't be), you should at least be acknowledging that they have no ethics and shunning them, not defending them for actually being the ones that built surveillance hellworld.
Everyone involved is to blame (including management), but it is an engineer somewhere that actually makes these things. Devices don't magically start spying because a business person makes a deal. The data doesn't magically end up in the hands of their 500 partners. There are large datastores to scale and integrations that require work to build.
And even if they're never held accountable (I expect they won't be), you should at least be acknowledging that they have no ethics and shunning them, not defending them for actually being the ones that built surveillance hellworld.