It never ceases to amaze me, that despite the pattern of behaviour, people continue to be willing to consider that Google/FAANGs/politicians/etc are just a bit thick and don't get it.

(Not a dig incidentally, just that at some point the pattern of behaviour must reach a point that swings Occam's Razor to malevolence being the most likely explanation)

Exactly.

1. History of privacy violation? Check.

2. Increasing pace and scope of privacy violations? Check.

3. Financial incentive to continue and expand privacy violations? Check.

4. Lack of legal oversight deterring continuing and deeper privacy violations? In every single nation, check.

At this point the onus is firmly with Google / Alphabet to prove the ethics of their actions, because we already know their intent.

You are assuming that the people talking to us have any chance of knowing. Even in a company with a relatively flat hierarchy there are walls of "they don't need/want to know that detail" between the engineers & budgeting[1] and top-brass & marketing. Sometimes this comes from the technical side ("I won't include that detail, it'll only confuse them") sometimes the other way ("That huge document you sent through, could you distil it down to a side or two of key points?").

I suppose they could try to instil a whistle-blowing culture whereby people are rewarded for highlighting potential problems list this to other silos[2], but then like external bug bounties you get into a new family of argument about what the problem is worth, who truly found it first, and the race to be first will lead to a lot of noise around any useful signal.

[1] the engineers will know it is there as they are designing the thing, the money people will know as they will have been involved in the "it is cheaper to just leave it and disable it than to redesign it out" decision-making process.

[2] no matter how flat/heterogenus/other-all-together-now-buzzword-compliant-word-of-the-momemtn a company claims to be, there will be siloed groups within it, and within them like Russian dolls in larger organisations.

> how on earth do they think they deserve trust

They probably don't, individually. They are like us, with similar concerns.

But they don't need to think they deserve it individually as long as the company overall can convince enough of us that they do (and convince enough of us that will never be convinced of that, that it doesn't really matter in the long run anyway).

who's "concerned about their privacy" and why?

Privacy is a important factor in the stability of free democratic societies.

Today we have a asymmetry of transparency: institutions and companies are intransparent while the individual isn’t. This assymetry in information translates into an asymmetry of power.

The traditional way citizen of free societies dealt with asymmetries of power was to divide them.

A government could easily sentence and jail anybody if it weren’t for some strangely roundabout rules that made this hard.

The privacy movement is part of a powerplay between individuals and entities that go beyond single persons.

Of course you also have those who think it is about their dick pics..

"The cause is in my will."[1] It's no one's business why I don't want FAANG snooping on me. That's what a right to privacy means.

[1] http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.2.2.h...