Executive class? I expect there was at least one engineer involved that should be facing millions of counts of wiretapping, so a few million years in prison.
There's plenty good reasons to have microphones in products. The simple obvious one is voice control. Legality and illegality all depends how it's used and controlled. And the company is controlling this remotely.
And your rank and file engineer or software dev is going to have low/no understanding of the subterfuge and illegality that the Executive class puts together as a final product. The features are possible, but the labor only knows their pieces. Executives are the ones selling illegally gotten data to "their 500 sponsors".
The rank-and-file do follow marching orders, but let us not pretend they are all innocent sheep who could not envision the true intentions of the design. "I just thought it would be a neat thing if all sounds in a room were recorded and uploaded to Samsung servers without bothering the end user!"
Everyone involved is to blame (including management), but it is an engineer somewhere that actually makes these things. Devices don't magically start spying because a business person makes a deal. The data doesn't magically end up in the hands of their 500 partners. There are large datastores to scale and integrations that require work to build.
And even if they're never held accountable (I expect they won't be), you should at least be acknowledging that they have no ethics and shunning them, not defending them for actually being the ones that built surveillance hellworld.
Executives can make the actual illegal and horrible plan, and divy up the work in pieces, so that labor is not aware of exactly what they're constructing. Executives have the complete picture. Its their idea. They know what's going on.
The microphone? It could be a voice interaction tool.
The spyware? Thats logging and monitoring of bugs for patches.
Automated image recognition? Again, more sketchy, but legal, and used to optimize those avenues of usage.
Its only the pieces used *in illegal ways* as ordered by executives that are the problem. If you're not a C level yourself, not sure why you're simping for them.
And the Samsung violating criminal statutes with wiretapping laws is the problem. I would rather blame the company, C levels first. 50 million years (5 years per, 10 million devices sold) of jailtime should be sufficient with dissolution and disbursement to all affected buyers of hardware. And, jailing of the C levels. But instead, you want to go after the electronic engineer who designed a PCB with a microphone. Yeah, im sure *he or she* had plans on creating spy devices across the world.
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.
1) Those who gave the order (position of power). Often a chain of command.
2) Those who planned it (usually the same or merged with group #1).
3) Those who implement the plan. The engineer, the soldier, the distributor (all down to the line of the logistics driver who delivered the evil TV), etc.
For some strange reason group #1 is called executives. They do not execute much though; they order others to, but execute sounds like they work hard, I guess. Those are indeed the most liable, and we must explain the why. Think Hitler, Himmler, Stalin, Mielke, etc. Lower down the line you get the Einsatzgruppe commanders.
The soldier who executed Jews (among other minority groups, mind you) with a gun is liable, but part of a power structure. If he refuses, he can and will get in trouble. Mass murder generates trauma, so it is executed by pawns or pawns of lieutenants. NKVD solved this by using others to execute.
Ergo: the higher up the chain, the more liable these people were as they had more power to say no.
That someone else would say yes is a red herring excuse. An engineer is in a position of power. They're an educated specialist in their field, they get paid for their job (not forced to implement in West), can say no. They can even blow the whistle. If those in power cannot find a fool to do their errands, they must do it themselves (and they cannot as no expertise), or lay down the idea.
The gas used to gas people in concentration camps didnt magically end up there. They weren't lied to that they'd get a shower by people who didn't knew what would happen. They knew or could've known, but they chose not to act.
(I'm using older examples of genocide as they are established and well documented; I am aware of more recent examples, but 1) this hasn't been solved legally, 2) I leave that comparison as an exercise to the reader.)
And when you're "wrong in isolation of the task to complete" is completely legal, you still want to destroy engineers and developers. That engineer doesnt know your illegal shit plan to do horrible thing. Most engineers, if told to do illegal stuff, would refuse.
That C level DOES know the illegal plan to do horrible thing, and their staff attorneys said you could make $20 billion, and pay $1 billion in fines if caught. I say RICO the fucking C levels for an ongoing criminal conspiracy, and depending how severe, death penalty.
And remember, we're talking about Samsung violating wiretapping laws, which is a criminal crime, and not some tort. I want blood here from management who ordered this, not a few dollars on a godsdamned voucher to buy yet another Scamsung device.
But no, your idea is to blame the rank and file folks who have maybe 5% of the plan, and legal at that, and blame them. Nah, you sound like a simp.
We're not limited to a bounded amount of blame to divvy out. We can blame the mob boss and the hitmen.
First, no single engineer that will completely implement this "spying feature". A hardware engineer knows how to put the mic inside the TV, the FW engineer knows how to write driver for application to get mic data, the application knows how use the pre-trained ML blob to process the data and send the result to Cloud. At that level, no one really knows what happening any more.
Can they make educated guess what is happening? yes, but still, it's just a guess.
There would be "alignment meeting" accross the various team, but trust me, they would never use the word "spying" in any slides.
You don't have to hide what's happening from people that work in ads. There are tons of people who willingly work at e.g. Facebook or Google knowing every single thing they will do is about ads. They might not use the word "spying," but only because they delude themselves into thinking people want the spying and propaganda (e.g. you don't have to look much to find people on this forum asking how else people would know what to buy. Nevermind that a significant portion of the population takes active steps to block them). Like they completely unironically think "you know, I am like a Big Brother. Why would anyone not want a Big Brother? "