The Microsoft telemetry spyware was completely opaque and they kept changing it to work around users blocking it until they were shamed into publishing almost everything they collect. One still can't turn it off.
Apple usually needs to be shamed into admitting to and repairing any broken hardware design. They had to be sued in multiple countries to stop misleading customers to buy AppleCare and allow them to use the warranty guaranteed by law.
That’s more of a reason not to trust anything ever. If leaders change for the worse, your investment in the company gets screwed no matter how well they’d done previously. And that investment can be stocks or it can be data, to give an example which you can’t just pull.
Leaders influence company culture but it's also a self-feedback loop where leaders that fit the company culture end up being leaders in the first place. To break that feedback loop and change course is usually a conscious choice for a company. Even then leadership change and direction at the top is only one of the many signals.
It's entirely possible for Zoom's CEO to be a security minded person and the PM/Infosec person who reviewed the security report decided it's not a flaw worth patching.
Microsoft and Apple have barely changed in all the ways they are bad though. Specifically Microsoft has just moved to a different place in the embrace expand extinguish cycle. Give it a few years and everyone will hate them again (and maybe be surprised that it happened at all) because they did something unethical.
I think that we'll never see the same feelings about Microsoft as existed in its heyday precisely because those feelings weren't just about what Microsoft tried to do, but actually about what it did. Microsoft will (probably) never again enjoy the hegemony it once did; so, however evilly it acts, it'll never be able to translate its evil deeds into the same impact that they once had.
