I think you'll find that I'm the only one in this thread that's not excusing anyone. There is no "instead." They all deserve 50 million years of prison. They all know what they're doing.

Maybe not the engineer who designed a microphone, but certainly the ones who integrated it into the spying platform. The TV doesn't accidentally send that data back. The data doesn't accidentally store itself, and it doesn't accidentally send itself to partners or feed into an ad model. The CEO is also probably not personally working the sales funnel. There's an entire line of people who all knew exactly what was happening.