I have. I considered it in depth and did a good deal of psychological research on it. Then I went out onto the street and asked people; dozens and dozens of ordinary people, old, young, rich, poor...
Result: People really care about privacy.
You can read all about it in the podcast and blog I am not allowed to mention here.
What you're alluding to I think is the idea that people do not fully understand the link between technology and privacy violation.
Our view here is also biased. The idea that "people don't care that much about privacy" naturally gets bandied around amongst developers for whom profitable software designs do violate people's privacy.
What happened to Google on privacy could easily happen to any company- people complained about the total amount of data Google had, the gut response of the devs was
“oh, you can trust us, we’re not using it for anything nefarious, just features/debugging”
And then Apple took that and used it as a marketing opportunity.
And now, once you get to a certain size, you start having to develop without metrics/logs, or go through a bunch of red tape to get them.
it's not that they don't care - they didnt think they need to care. There's a big difference. Implicit trust in the data usage is the key here.
On the one hand, this implicit trust means the customer is a really good one. But abuses of this trust is inevitable imho, and eventually, it will be made public if it happened. Only then, will those average person actually reveal their real preference - that they do care!