They can't win with some people. Either they ignore it and those people say they don't care about privacy, or they rattle the sabre (for their users' benefit, for once) and people say they're posturing or spinning a nothing into something positive for them. I guess it's the PR department's job to do this but I get the impression that for some they're the new big company that you can love to hate.

Personally I think it's better that they said it, whether the reality of these increasingly common stories is actually so common or not.