You may be passionate and well informed enough to have the strength of conviction to take appropriate action, but most people are not.
Nothing will change unless you can affect the behavior of others. You will be fought every step of the way: for the company, this is a fight for survival.
>they can because you let them.
What does this statement reveal about your internal dialogue? You can't expect people who don't understand or who aren't involved to take action. You are delegating your responsibility. Perhaps it is good for your ego, but I can tell you how it turns out.
A more appropriate statement would be, "because I let them."
>deciding to pivot my personal career into public advocacy or civil service
There have been worse ideas. It's worth fighting. :)
Organizations will engage in behavior if the expected risk-adjusted payoff is sufficiently large, from eroding privacy to cheating emissions tests. Unless we can change that equation we should expect to lose in the long run. This behavior is emergent, based on laws of power and organizational structure.
Organizations stand to win far more than lose, and a victory for us does not provide the same millions of dollars. They get stronger as we get weaker, and they use that strength to win people over to their position.
I don't think it's unrelated, and perhaps your point is that it's doubly clear no one has thought about ethics when you examine Sean's contradictory responses. But I think the lack of patriotism is more of an example.
Anyway, at the end of the day we're all people and we are the ones that depend on these companies and services. If you don't believe a company is behaving ethically, stop using their services. Make a damn sacrifice and live your virtue. Sure maybe we could argue that to some extent and in certain cases some companies have crossed the line and are harmfully exploiting customers to the extent that there should be legal ramifications, but the government does not exist to provide you an ethically sterile society. It exist to maintain and protect basic human rights--at least in the US as far as the formal documentation is concerned.
As far as I can gather based on armchair political philosophy over drinks.. most people don't actually care about privacy and rank convenience or safety (at the expense of said privacy) higher in their priorities. I find that unfortunate but at the same time I still haven't worked up the courage to totally disband my Facebook account and switch completely over to my proton mail accounts. So it's complicated.
If we could all agree that privacy is a fundamental human right which you would think would be supported by the constitution in the US then, we should actually act/rally to legislate such as other countries have done. Yet at the same time because these companies operate globally, they serve a diverse spectrum of users who may or may not share the same political and social values as we do in the US. This extends to the very employees who are "failing to ask the ethical questions" that Kumail can so obviously see are overlooked. This is globalization.
TL;DR: they do this because they can, and they can because you let them.