I wonder if these kinds of painful (from a business perspective) choices will act as a kind of forcing function on their whole privacy push, either by highlighting the hypocrisy if they continue mining customer data while preaching virtue, or alternatively, by really pushing them to put their money where their mouth is and creating a more truly private system.

I think the biggest factor will be if they can convince the US population (their core demographic / market) that privacy matters. If it does, then it will be worth it to their bottom line - if not, they may have to capitulate to market forces and return to squeezing as much data as they can from their users.

The next few years could be very interesting from a privacy standpoint.