Companies also have their executives do things like tell you that they only use data ethically and responsibly, then turn around and sell it to the highest bidd

Companies also have their executives do things like tell you that they only use data ethically and responsibly, then turn around and sell it to the highest bidder. A lot of times unless you're on a team or in a department that's doing this stuff for nefarious purposes, you wouldn't know. Anecdotal evidence: I worked in RPA (robotic process automation) for a large software company. We were tasked with automating a decision process. The decision process was completely benign. Something like a payments process. Pretty easy. We finished it in a few months start to finish. We hand it off, it goes into production. A lot of back slapping and high fives happen. I go on with my work, move out of the company a few months later. About a year later, a guy I worked with at the company emails me a news story about a company using the RPA program we built to auto deny insurance claims for their clients. Massive class action lawsuit. The insurance company had taken our script and just re-purposed it to auto deny a certain percentage of claims. I was shocked and dismayed that someone would use the stuff we built for their own shady business practices. It was a huge wakeup call that even when you're building something completely benign, a company can pay millions for it and reuse it to do bad things to people and you'll never know until its too late.