Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not when a company is suddenly deciding to do something outright evil. The problem is when the company starts slowly pushing the boundaries in ways that can be justified if you squint right. E.g. consider this extra tracking. The feature in itself is fine, as long as the data is protected well enough and not abused. The problem is that staff not used to think about nefarious uses are likely to defend t…
I generally agree with you that not having the data would make it easier to refuse. But not having the data does come at a cost: in this case, poorer user experience. As a side note, I was mainly talking abt Uber. Your post seems generic and your concerns apply to every large tech company. Most of these companies already have policies in place such as audit trail for data access, access control etc.
I'm saying that to "avoid evil" in the future it is insufficient for current developers to be ethical now.
You need to build systems that actively make it difficult, so that it takes persistence and intent to overcome if you want to do something bad whenever possible. Force people to face that they are putting in effort to bypass restrictions and breaking rules to do what they want to do, instead of "just" accessing data that are readily available to them, and far more will question the justification for requests they are given.