In a negotiation over a software solution, someone told me: “We take data privacy very seriously.” It came from sales, not from the legal department.

That placement matters. Once a data protection claim sits inside a pitch, it belongs to a different logic than the one it claims to serve.

The standard argument for putting it there runs like this: transparency builds trust, and trust keeps customers. That much is true. It is also where the problem starts.

Once ethics becomes a competitive advantage, it survives only for as long as it functions as one. Raise the cost of privacy protection above its commercial benefit and it stops being a feature. It becomes a cost line, and companies optimise it like any other.

In that moment I asked myself whether the company would still talk about ethics if nobody asked. My answer came before I had finished the question: for a software vendor, ethics is part of the marketing.

Real data protection costs money and development time. Regulation leaves a wide grey zone, and staying compliant across all of it is hard; falling short brings penalties that can be severe. Transparent companies still win trust for it. Transparency costs money, and the losses from broken trust run higher than that.

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) shows how the sequence actually runs. Companies that had ignored data privacy for years built comprehensive systems within a few months once the regulation took effect. Their values had not changed: the penalties had become high enough. The economics changed before the values did.

Only after that did companies discover the commercial value in what they had built and turn it into a selling point. That sounds better than it is. Companies noticed that customers demand privacy, and they adapted for as long as adapting pays.

There is nothing wrong with using privacy as an advantage. Values that hold only when profitable stop being values.

A few companies act from genuine conviction. They pay for it, or turn down business that others would take. They grow somewhat more slowly than the ones that do not put ethics at the top of the agenda, and get less credit for it than they deserve.

The companies that use ethics as marketing sit ahead of them. A good marketing strategy is hard to argue with.

So what happens to values that hold only while they are profitable or marketable? My own view is that they are not crisis-proof.