Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

Reiterating the questions posed at the end,

To what extent should personal ethics play in deciding where a (software) engineer should work? What if the engineer has no other choices for a job, and needs to (make rent/pay the bills/eat food)?

It is true that it'd be pretty easy to circumvent the tracking, by placing paper over the webcam, running the browser in a virtual machine, spoofing data to the browser, and so on. However these are infeasible for most non-technical people, so I don't think it's a real solution. Freedom shouldn't be only for those with extremely technical knowledge.

Wait, I see nothing wrong with any of this. Obviously Amazon is trying to curb cheating on remote coding/compatibility tests. They don't actually care to collect any info about you beyond what you do during the test. They don't care which websites you visit before or after the test. Or how you use your clipboard - after the test. But during the test, it's not so unreasonable. People do cheat, especially if they can get away with it and when the payoff is potentially huge.

To an even greater extent, ethics is a serious issue in network engineering as well. What happens when you're an employee of an ISP in Turkey and you're asked to MITM all port 53/DNS traffic? Or implement something like DNS lookup redirects to an advertising page? Censorship? The UK GCHQ and snooper's charter requires you to run a transparent http proxy and keep logs of every site every residential customer visits?

You work for a Thai ISP and the government orders you to block everything that insults the king and royal family?

You do network enginering for a mobile phone network operator in a developing African nation and they want to redesign parts of their network to support participation in the Facebook "free basics" walled garden internet for your GSM/UMTS/HSPA+/LTE type customers?

edit: there are a lot of things you can do to mess with a properly functioning internet, on the behalf of autocratic regimes or greedy corporations, just at OSI layers 2, 3 and 4... That's before you even get to the level of operating system and applications/software engineering.

My best guess is n^3:n^3-n, making the answer 60, but I have no idea what the real answer is.

feels like this person is overreacting. You should also not be sharing any questions that were asked.