I may have been wrong about it, but I disagree it's off-topic. Lip service is one thing, pressuring other parties to give up their snooping is one thing, actual

I may have been wrong about it, but I disagree it's off-topic. Lip service is one thing, pressuring other parties to give up their snooping is one thing, actually being committed and simply deleting or encrypting as much as they can so the question doesn't even arise, or even considering and talking about the trade-offs required to do so, that would be quite another. So it's all mostly window dressing to me. I believe that they care about their profits, but that's about it. These corporations actually could afford to find out stuff about their markets by asking people who volunteer, by super traditional means that have been used for decades before the internet. They don't really need your complete life history, they just need a good rough idea, and then be honest engineers and programmers that make the best products they can make. This "we need to internally probe you to improve customer service" stuff to a large degree is marketing run amok, not really something that is impossible to do without unless you don't subscribe to "the best product wins", which everybody loves to pay lip service to but then tries their best to circumvent.