I did say "and engineers who build these systems"; and if you want to also blame managers, I'm all for that! I don't think your point about product owners merel

I did say "and engineers who build these systems"; and if you want to also blame managers, I'm all for that! I don't think your point about product owners merely asking for ideas (unless they asked for evil ideas) makes as much sense, though, and I don't even know who these "finance gremlins" are really supposed to be, but I am more than willing to believe some blame might fall on them as well. Regardless, though: at the end of the day blame must fall on an actual people, as it is people who make decisions and it is people who take actions and it is only people who can stop any of it. It is utterly ridiculous that even if we were to create a law that said it was illegal to create a dialog box that said "maybe later", somehow we would merely fine Microsoft and hope that disincentivizes the behavior while all the people who push on the law and continually test its boundaries in new products don't really have to worry about it themselves. FWIW, I actually will say I am more than a bit sympathetic to the argument that we should just blame everyone vaguely involved to the point where if we meet someone who works for these companies we should look at them with some side eye... but, the reality is that some people at whatever company we are talking about (here: Microsoft) are obviously more to blame for whatever evil decision we are dealing with than others, and so your attempt to pitch a tent so big that anyone not just merely vaguely involved with a decision but somehow in the entire industry should somehow be deserving of equal shame--and so we should oh-so-conveniently just not blame anyone at all--feels like a disingenuous attempt at distraction.