Exactly. For the life of me I can't understand why so many companies don't get that it's better to lay all your cards on the table when this stuff happens than to hem and haw and obfuscate. If El Steve-o had just come out right away and said "we're collecting stuff, it's not very detailed, we'll put in a mechanism to turn it off without losing any location-aware functionality," this could have blown over before senators started getting involved. See also, Sony on the PSN outage, TEPCO on the scale of the containment problems at Fukushima, etc.

I guess the nature of cover-ups is that we don't hear so much about the successful ones, but it seems to me the risk of letting these questions linger does more harm than any good that comes from hiding the truth.