That's all very true, but I'm not sure that's what the author is talking about. Most services, including hacker news, won't let you delete accounts. They could

That's all very true, but I'm not sure that's what the author is talking about. Most services, including hacker news, won't let you delete accounts. They could, but it would require more effort during implementation. It's easier for us engineers to say "accounts can never be deleted", and base the whole system on that. But that decision takes control from customers. Here's another one: Someone coded that backdoor we found in all linksys routers a few years ago. A manager somewhere, maybe at the NSA, maybe at linksys, said to a developer "I want you to write a backdoor into all these production routers so they'll expose everything if you send a certain request over HTTP. We want that request to be the same for every router.", and the developer did it. I think software engineering ethics with regard to how we implement things is in an ok place. It's improving, and that's an ok place to be. Software engineering ethics with regard to what we implement, on the other hand, has never been worse.