[wpietri]

What percentage of the general public do you imagine could give a coherent summary of Cambridge Analytica scandal? I'd be amazed if it were as high as 5%. I get that a lot of people here know about it. But it had no direct impact on most users. It's not surprising that they don't understand this any better than a host of other subtle but important things.

People can't all devote time and energy to everything that's important. It's too big a world. We shouldn't conclude that those things don't matter to them. Our current emergency is a fine example: until a pandemic happened, few knew enough to worry about it. But that doesn't mean we were indifferent to the outcome.

[MattGaiser]

> People can't all devote time and energy to everything that's important.

Well if the users can't spend any time on it, it isn't sufficiently important for the business to care about it as the users will be briefly miffed and then go on to what they consider important.

User unhappiness matters only so far as it changes behavior.

[wpietri]

That's just not the only way things change. Look, for example, at the establishment of the FDA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act

Industrial food companies were taking significant liberties with food quality and safety. And it was apparently fine! People appeared not to care. Then Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle happened to catch the popular imagination, leading to a wave of outrage and investigations. People still "didn't care" in the sense of, say, not buying industrially produced food. But they did very much care, leading to a regulatory regime that has lasted more than a century.