Do you think it's more common for businesses to studiously avoid making promises that they might one day be unable to keep, or to make promises for temporary competitive advantage without worrying if 'unforeseen exigent circumstances' might require these 'promises' to be broken? I think your conclusion is correct, but my assessment would be: personal integrity or business success, choose one.
Edit: To tone that down a bit, "Moral Mazes" by Robert Jackall is an excellent although academic work on the ways in which corporate and government ethics differ from commonly espoused personal ethics. I find it a valuable key to trying to understand attitudes toward conscientious leakers such as Snowden. I am implying a value judgment, but realize the details are complex.
"Moral Mazes" seems to have become a cultural signifier, meant to evoke a whole series of positions and beliefs about the trustworthiness of large organizations. When someone drops "moral mazes" in a conversation, I read that as a shorthand; a more intellectually credible way of saying "the whole system is out of order!"
Generally: I think that when the core promise of your business is that you'll do everything you can to resist incursions on user privacy, then yes, it should be pretty common for those promises to be scrutinized.
> "Moral Mazes" seems to have become a cultural signifier
I'm sure it's that too, but I've currently got it checked out as an interlibrary loan serving as my bedtime reading, and I'm finding it really insightful. But perhaps this is because I'm starting from a point of bewilderment as to what motivates most people to act as they do.
> a more intellectually credible way of saying "the whole system is out of order!"
But the miracle is that rather than being out of order, the system mostly works, and tends to keep working. What I like about the book is that it strives to explain the situation from the inside as a mostly coherent belief system, rather than critiquing it from outside as untenable.
Edit: To tone that down a bit, "Moral Mazes" by Robert Jackall is an excellent although academic work on the ways in which corporate and government ethics differ from commonly espoused personal ethics. I find it a valuable key to trying to understand attitudes toward conscientious leakers such as Snowden. I am implying a value judgment, but realize the details are complex.