They need to tell themselves that "data privacy" is a non-issue because otherwise they would have to take responsibility for feeding Facebook/Google all of their users for many years, which directly resulted in fake news laced political advertisements which micro-targeted voters in the presidential elections.
The book "careless people" clearly documents how Facebook engineers were embedded in the Trump campaign to run fake news advertisements micro-targeted to US voters.
It takes a lot of strength to resolve such a fundamental cognitive dissonance, especially if your self image is the talented techie who made money without hurting anyone.
This is just as bogus as the user vs developer distinction in copyleft world.
Of course users benefit from the operator knowing if their design decisions are actually on the right track.