I think you answered your own question. The reason people expected Facebook to change is because people don't seem to understand that the general rule is that when a large company makes a statement it is invariably based around public relations. They will say whatever they think it is that will receive the most positive response from the population, regardless of the truthfulness of that statement, at least so long as it cannot open them up to legal counter action.
Facebook's behavior is not going to change with a humbler set of leaders. Their entire fundamental business model is based around collecting sensitive information. And they're starting to reach the absolute extremes of market saturation meaning that the only way they can continue to grow is to offer more effective advertising which relies on harvesting even more data from their users. If you want a social media service that respects users' privacy and rights then it would need to be either a non-profit decentralized service, or a for-payment service. The former would suffer from lacking the funds to reach a critical mass, and the latter would fail because nobody's going to pay to join a small social media service - let alone the subscription model that would be necessary.
Facebook's behavior is not going to change with a humbler set of leaders. Their entire fundamental business model is based around collecting sensitive information. And they're starting to reach the absolute extremes of market saturation meaning that the only way they can continue to grow is to offer more effective advertising which relies on harvesting even more data from their users. If you want a social media service that respects users' privacy and rights then it would need to be either a non-profit decentralized service, or a for-payment service. The former would suffer from lacking the funds to reach a critical mass, and the latter would fail because nobody's going to pay to join a small social media service - let alone the subscription model that would be necessary.