There are certainly legal reasons to not directly lie about the privacy practices of your company. I’m sure it has happened before, but are we really worried about, for example, Facebook lying about WhatsApp messages being end-to-end encrypted? Surely researchers would expose that lie pretty quickly.

And CEOs and leadership teams come and go. If the only thing making a company respect your privacy is the principles of the CEO, and especially if that respect for privacy is bad for the company’s bottom line, then you can bet that CEO is going to have a change of heart after a board meeting or is going to get fired as soon as there’s a bad quarter.