Despite paying lip service to privacy, many people here still work on privacy-eroding companies and services.
How many people here work Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or LinkedIn, Palantir, etc... (not to mention less well-known names that still erode privacy).. probably a lot.
Many founders (another group heavily represented on HN) are just after their pot of gold at the end of the IPO, and will gleefully walk over as many users' backs as it takes.
In some ways worse, though, are the people who are intimately familiar with technology, and who are enabling the people at the top. These people all have a choice of who to work for and what to do. No one's holding a gun to their head making them work on tracking and spyware and user-disempowerment, and yet they do.