I have a friend who is one one the best programmers I know. He worked for an ad tech company more than a decade ago optimizing time to respond for personalized ad delivery. He was not proud of working to act on fingerprinting to optimize delivery but it was a challenging task and he framed his part as addressing the challenge not the ethics. People in our circle where like "good for you optimizing network delivery to 50ms!" even people who despised the idea of tracking users around the internet to serve them ads.

I'm sure most people who work for flock compartmentalize their jobs to "I work on fingerprinting vehicles" or "I work on advanced OCR", or "I work on creating camera to camera trajectory graphs". This way they don't need to think about (too often) the larger ramifications of what they are doing. When the press points out what is the reality and that most people are pissed at Flock then the employees likely have to confront what they do in a way that they never had to.

except when people have no shame, i.e the entirety of the trump admin