Data about A is the fuel for the machines that allow them to provide value for group B. I removed the indirection in my metaphors to try and communicate how the "consciousness" of a large company views the assertion. If you view google as a sentient entity, it looks upon comments like the GP as though they're coming from children.
I could've added more parity by replacing the business rivals with the words "decentralization" on all of my examples, but I think it muddies the message for no gain.
"Google should think about what it's doing to people's privacy!" sounds naive to me because google does exactly this! The levy of google's smartest are constantly trying to find ways to gather more data, or infer more things from the data they've got.
Privacy is more of a business rival to google than any other company. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri -- they're all just new pump jacks.
Really, the whole concept of the parent shows a lot of naiveté I didn't even address. 7/10 engineers on a floor agreeing not to take the "mind control plebs" ticket doesn't do a thing when there's enough people to complete it anyways. Your gesture didn't do anything.
Publicly martyring your career for your idealism DOES add a nugget of fuel to society's awareness and opinions about the thing, but I suspect the issue is just too oblique right now for that fire to get started.
Off topic, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Facebook / Google are >100 years ahead of everyone else in sociology. At some point the code's just cracked, and taking away the keys doesn't do anything but deepen the moat around Facebook / Google.
If those companies are ever defeated in war, I suspect that their contribution to society will be similar to Unit 731, Ahnenerbe, or any of number the other non consensual human experimentation throughout the years. We'll tut tut about the unethical mongrels while telepathically scheduling the chores of our vat grown slaves made possible by the abuses of this era.
Or maybe engineers will just agree to stop sometime soon and that'll be that!
I don't see how any of those is analogous the parent's suggestion. Privacy is not a business rival to Google (as Amazon to small shops or UPS to bike couriers).
True, the attribute privacy hurts one of Google's profit channels; but then, it also makes the product less attractive [1] to the users it needs and exposes it to legal liability, or may leak information that hurts users and hurts profitability in other ways. Even if Google benefits from loss of privacy in some respects, it is hurt in other ways by not consistently, predictably enforcing privacy boundaries.
Neither is true for Amazon vs mom-and-pop or UPS vs independent bike couriers.
Lumping them together is unfair and only communicates "there exists a superficial similarity to an argument that's stupid".
[1] I get it, "if you're not paying, you're not the customer..." My point should be clear though.