[hnthrowtier1]

Power, paranoia, crime, curiosity.

Power: Businesses are run by humans, who do not merely optimize discounted cashflows. Some humans enjoy wielding power, and frequently do so in an antisocial manner. See eg Stanford Prison Experiment.

Paranoia: Royalty have always been paranoid. Much has been written about the intelligence operations of paranoid merchants in Renaissance Venice. You should think of huge private entities like Koch Industries and Bloomberg as kingdoms. Maybe security teams want to see threats, which increases their importance to the organization.

Crime: Theft, manipulation, subversion. Companies do crime all the time, and are rarely held to account. There are indirect indicators that this type of conduct is becoming more common.

Curiosity: According to Snowden, even cleared NSA employees who pass a polygraph and invasive FBI background check abuse their access to personal data out of curiosity. This is probably a human invariant.