" Quick, think of one of the largest and most consistently flagrant private entities who violates the privacy of its users on a regular basis, and is well known

" Quick, think of one of the largest and most consistently flagrant private entities who violates the privacy of its users on a regular basis, and is well known for it." And then you go on to claim Facebook and Google as examples of your "violation of privacy". That's like saying my email provider violates my privacy because my email goes through their servers. Or the post-office violates my privacy because my snail mail goes through them. Quite a bit of a stretch, if you ask me. What people do care about is targeted invasion of privacy, for lack of a better phrase. It's one thing having anonymized data "abused" for targeted advertising and selling as aggregated statistics. But it's completely different if you have an entity that can read your emails at will, and decide to throw you in a cage if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person.