To be fair; you don't need a union... you can just say no. Context; I told them they couldn't ship this exact feature as designed. (It worked until I left.)

Why not just ask for context and approval of the legal team? That would generate enough trail so some shady requirements get dropped almost immediately; having your superior explicitly sign off in writing a feature you deemed unethical and/or potentially illegal is a great way of actually removing them from the pipeline. You can even frame it as "a good guy" just alerting him/her that there may be a fallback, so make sure it has all necessary elements. Compliance decisions are often above a developers paygrade, and one should squarely document the culprit on any shady decision - and boy, this is very easy in big organizations where no single decision-maker wants to be accountable.

You could join the Order of the Engineer and refuse to do things that would not be compatible with your understanding of the Obligation of an Engineer [1]. Of course, that doesn't stop your employer from asking someone else to do it and asking you to find other employment.

There's a few other orders or societies or what have you that you could join. Personally, I don't drive a train or even wear a stripey hat, so I haven't considered joining an organization for Engineers.

[1] https://order-of-the-engineer.org/about-the-order/obligation...

Start one. Unions are worker owned. You could also join the IWW.

I'd wonder how you'd get into that arrangement to begin with when the entire job is based on unethical tracking

Honestly - shouldn't one assume that train already departed when they decided to work for company that is basically data mining operation with no ethics?

You don't need to join a union to push back against unethical feature requests.

Take a lead, let me sign up :)

That’s what licensing is for, not unions.

> not so much to get better working conditions but

... why not both?