[quantumtremor]

Reiterating the questions posed at the end,

To what extent should personal ethics play in deciding where a (software) engineer should work? What if the engineer has no other choices for a job, and needs to (make rent/pay the bills/eat food)?

It is true that it'd be pretty easy to circumvent the tracking, by placing paper over the webcam, running the browser in a virtual machine, spoofing data to the browser, and so on. However these are infeasible for most non-technical people, so I don't think it's a real solution. Freedom shouldn't be only for those with extremely technical knowledge.

[walrus01]

To an even greater extent, ethics is a serious issue in network engineering as well. What happens when you're an employee of an ISP in Turkey and you're asked to MITM all port 53/DNS traffic? Or implement something like DNS lookup redirects to an advertising page? Censorship? The UK GCHQ and snooper's charter requires you to run a transparent http proxy and keep logs of every site every residential customer visits?

You work for a Thai ISP and the government orders you to block everything that insults the king and royal family?

You do network enginering for a mobile phone network operator in a developing African nation and they want to redesign parts of their network to support participation in the Facebook "free basics" walled garden internet for your GSM/UMTS/HSPA+/LTE type customers?

edit: there are a lot of things you can do to mess with a properly functioning internet, on the behalf of autocratic regimes or greedy corporations, just at OSI layers 2, 3 and 4... That's before you even get to the level of operating system and applications/software engineering.

[SilasX]

Okay, but that's sort of a self-enforcing rule, isn't it? The very fact that you can figure all of that out enough to fool the monitors means you're qualified for the role.

Kinda like, "haha! I secretly got messages delivered to me during the steganography test! It's obviously not a legit test."

[jellicle]

Well, obviously putting paper over the webcam would result in a FAIL grade for the test, so it's hardly that easy.

Maybe you could record yourself staring intently at the screen and play that back to the webcam during the exam.

[walrus01]

What happens if you have an old laptop like a Thinkpad T60 that doesn't have a camera?

[spc476]

Or a desktop computer sans camera?

[rhizome]

I have a Thinkpad 450s a little over a year old, and I ordered it without a cam.

[negamax]

I don't personally see anything wrong with these remote, screen based, assessment requirements. These are to curb any chance of cheating. If we focus on reason instead of jumping the gun to privacy violation.

Coming to your question. First question is easy. In a business environment, subjected to international rules and regulations; ethics are a priority. Second one not so. Kind of similar to when does it become acceptable to rob someone if robber can't make ends meet. Depending on jurisdiction; court will decide level of leniency.