In my experience it is more nuanced than that, engineering will add a feature or capability and someone will come along and find a use for it that was unintended. At the search engine where I worked we came up with ways to inspect and adjust host rank and page rank such that we could knock out bad sites from the search results that were doing a good job gaming the system. But that biz dev folks also noted the same pieces could be combined to favor someone who advertised with us over someone who didn't.

The engineering feature is designed with pure intentions, keep crap out of the results stream, but the mechanism is amoral. If you're executive team wants to exploit it for more money so that the company does better financially, your options are limited as an engineer.