When you say “profitable software designs” my bet is that if you have any person off the street a “tour” of google and how their data is actually treated, more than 1/3 of them would be okay with sharing that information, and wouldn’t believe it to be a violation of their privacy.
What happened to Google on privacy could easily happen to any company- people complained about the total amount of data Google had, the gut response of the devs was
“oh, you can trust us, we’re not using it for anything nefarious, just features/debugging”
And then Apple took that and used it as a marketing opportunity.
And now, once you get to a certain size, you start having to develop without metrics/logs, or go through a bunch of red tape to get them.
What happened to Google on privacy could easily happen to any company- people complained about the total amount of data Google had, the gut response of the devs was
“oh, you can trust us, we’re not using it for anything nefarious, just features/debugging”
And then Apple took that and used it as a marketing opportunity.
And now, once you get to a certain size, you start having to develop without metrics/logs, or go through a bunch of red tape to get them.