Forgive me, but I'd actually like to hear vrosas's response or someone else with a similar background. I appreciate you trying to answer my question and help try to make me informed, but I don't want to hear speculation, especially the rather obvious ones. That's not helping, it just adds more noise to the conversation and discourages a response by them. We all know money pays the bills, no one needs to hear that. But hey, if that's what they say, then you'll be proven right. So let's wait and find out. I really do want to understand their mentality. I hope you do too because how else do we break the cycle?

The average guy is exactly the person responsible for global warming. The evil of the world is just the meta accumulation of the average person following their mirco incentives.

Having you own morale and ethics is far from futile. Each individual should be able to question the law and object taking part in something they don't agree, as long as it doesn't break the law.

Killing someone is legal in certain countries for different reasons (I'm not talking about war). Not sure I would like to get involved in that business, for instance if I don't agree on how and why people are sentenced to death in my country.

Some people are built with low ethics. Sure, if it's not made illegal, they'll always find someone to do it. Looks like in that case it might be illegal, as TV makers are sued.

If morality never factors into your own decisions, you don't get to be upset when it doesn't factor into other peoples'. In other words, society just sucks when everyone thinks this way, even if it true that resolving it is hard.

It is definitely ethically unsound and it is definitely a common example even related to Nazis. Similar to "just following orders". Which I'll remind everyone, will not save you in a court of law[0]...

You are abdicating your own moral responsibility on the assumption of a deterministic reality.

The literal textbook version of this ethical issue, one you'll find in literally any intro to ethics class is

  If I don't do this job then somebody else will. The only difference is that I will not get paid and if I get paid I will do good with that money where as if somebody else gets paid they might not.

But either way, it is you abdicating your personal responsibility and making the assumption that the job will be done regardless. But think about the logic here. If people do not think like you then the employer must then start offering higher wages in order to entice others. As there is some function describing people's individual moral lines and their desire for money. Even if the employer must pay more you are then helping deter that behavior because you are making it harder to implement. Alternatively the other person that does the job might not be as good at the job as you, making the damage done less than had you done the job. It's not hard to see that often this will result in the job not even existing as truthfully these immoral jobs are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Even if you are making the assumption that the job will be done it would be more naive to assume the job is done to the same quality. (But kudos on you for the lack of ego and thinking you aren't better than other devs)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

If you want a consequentialist answer:

If, for ethical reasons, fewer people were willing to take these jobs, then either salaries would have to rise or the work would be done less effectively.

If salaries rise, the business becomes more expensive and harder to scale. If effectiveness drops, the systems are less capable of extracting/using people’s data.

Either way, refusing these jobs imposes real friction on the surveillance model.

If you want a deontological answer:

You have a responsibility not to participate in unethical behavior, even if someone else would.

The fact that it can be used to "justify" almost anything. It obviously doesn't work as a defense in the court, and neither does it work as a justification for doing legal but unethical things.