You can't verify what a company does with your data. You can't audit their servers. You can't read their internal policies. You have to trust something. What I trust is incentives.

If a company's business model depends on customers continuing to use and pay for their product, breaking that trust is supposed to be expensive. Except sometimes it isn't. Facebook's user base grew 13% the year after Cambridge Analytica. Revenue went up 49%. The stock fully recovered.

Turns out the incentive only bites when leaving is actually an option. Nobody quit Facebook over data misuse because quitting meant losing every conversation, every photo, every person you'd have to re-find on some other app. The exit cost more than the betrayal did.

For most of the software you actually choose between, switching costs an afternoon, not your identity. That's exactly when incentives start doing real work. Not blind trust. Not naive trust either. Trust that only means something when you could walk away and the company knows it.