Exactly. People completely disconnect their own incentives as a shareholder ("hope price goes up") with those as a user(privacy/ethics in this case). When you

Exactly. People completely disconnect their own incentives as a shareholder ("hope price goes up") with those as a user(privacy/ethics in this case). When you only want the price of FB/GOOG to rise as a shareholder and are happy when it does (regardless of what it took to achieve it), don't be surprised when the board that represents the shareholders does whatever it takes to make it happen. As a shareholder, you can be completely ignorant (or knowing but indifferent) of what it takes to deliver returns to your investment yet support those measures by buying shares. As a board member, the only incentive then is to raise share price because you know shareholders don't know/care about what it takes. When the system delivers rewards to both shareholders and people running the company for extracting more profit, and requires little scrutiny of the means in which that is done, the logical optimization target function is just that - profit. The system converges to optimizing the target function. If you are not a shareholder but merely a user, this does not apply to you. But then, your only input into the system it whether you choose to remain a user. As long as enough people remain such that the business can continue to function an generate profits, there is again no incentive for a business to change its behavior.