Companies don't have ethics, but a company that sells eyeballs for money is much more likely to take decisions that negatively impact customers compared to a company that sells producs.
Google and Facebook would have been worse for Skype, they both suck at privacy.
This is getting way off topic, but of course companies have ethics. Just like they have core values, goals, and ambitions... A company is made up of people and those people can choose to make ethical decisions and can have a history of acting ethically or not.
The fact that employees have ethics does have an effect on the actions that the company takes, but that doesn't mean that the company itself "has ethics". At most we can say that a company employs ethical individuals - still - that won't necessarily lead to ethical decisions. Things like peer-pressure, the board of directors, profits, strategy, market pressure and so on can make good people do bad things.
Historically we can see that companies (especially corporations) are as ethical as the laws force them to be, especially when it comes to decisions affecting the bottom line.
You're arguing semantics, which is useless, and also very wrong.
People themselves have ethics because that's the only way of living in a society -- discerning between good and evil, making decisions that aren't hurtful to others -- these are standards we live by because they work best in improving our own quality of life.
Historically, we can see that people (especially leaders) are as ethical as the laws of their society force them to be, especially when it comes to decisions affecting their well-being (which quite often is their bottom line).
In society when people misbehave, they get marginalized, discriminated against, even abused. E.g. for rapists punishment doesn't stop immediately after jail-time was served, for some unlucky ones the real punishment only begins after getting out of jail.
Things like peer-pressure, the board of directors,
profits, strategy, market pressure and so on can
make good people do bad things.
People with strong character and clear ethical guidelines have always been able to get past the herd-mentality. You really can't excuse morally-wrong behavior just because that person is part of a herd, just as you can't excuse the herd itself.
The original message said that "MS and FB are practically the same ethics-wise to me".
In that context I replied that income sources are a much better predictor of company behaviour than so-called company ethics.
You can look at a company and try to analyze its decisions from an ethical point of view, but that is just using a convenient and familiar simplification to understand a complex entity. One can say that a company is "good" or "bad" or "immoral", one could even say that it has goals and ambitions as someone mentioned earlier, but how useful is this really in trying to understand that company and in predictiing its actions?
There are companies that say "we don't track or store your information" and then there are companies that write five page long privacy policies that link to other privacy policies and so on.
