When I hear stories like this I think of the developers who likely thought of and implemented the systems behind these criminal acts and I'm once more reminded that software developers, in aggregate, are on a similar level to '90s finance "tricksters" etc. We'll do whatever if the money is there.
One unfortunate side of progress and technological advancement is that it can be unethical, in the hands of people with less ethics.
Think of it this way: 1. Anybody in robotics/ai/ml is helping uav technology used for military purpose. 2. Anybody in financial lending could help fuel financial crisis. 3. Anybody in software could be enabling surveillance technology without even realizing.
Let's not ignore the group dynamic though either. People's moral convictions can be somewhat flexible when it comes to fitting in and blending in with a group, including a company.
Yes it's true that if your personal ethics are strong enough, you'll resist or exit a group whose ethics conflict with your own. It's also true that if the company has good ethics, you won't have to.
Meanwhile the weak-minded as Obi Wan might call them, will go with the flow and behave however the group behaves. If the group is impeccably ethical, they'll act accordingly. And if the group is predatory, they'll act accordingly.
In short, both individual and group ethics have to fail to get an Uber situation. And in business the group ethics and the tone are set from the top down - Travis. This is why people go on about the importance of company culture.
However, they don't have to fail at the same time or in a single step. This type of problem can creep in slowly over years as the "normalization of deviance"[1].
Richard Cook presented[2] a very useful model for how this type of problem creeps into complex system. The pressure from economic and workload concerns never goes away, so unless there is a proactive, explicit counter force, way to push back against that force, the system will inevitably be pushed toward failure. Therefor it's important to stop problems early when they are small. The magnitude of the counter force increases rapidly as behavior becomes increasingly deviant.
