As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see instances of the "outside" reading too much into an action that the company takes. However. From the ins

As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see instances of the "outside" reading too much into an action that the company takes. However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your actions might look to the outside with little to no context. The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways: "wow thats really useful" and "wow that's fucking intrusive." Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the street that we have done effective work to mitigate the downsides so that its a net benefit to society. This means we have to actually think about how adversaries might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than handwavey "oh but no one would be that evil/stupid/malevolent/power hungry" large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny, the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default hate, rather than "why are they doing that seemingly stupid thing?" Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young people's eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.