"So the Shieldings' hero, hard-pressed and enraged, took a firm hold of the hilt and swung the blade in an arc, a resolute blow that bit deep into her neck-bone and severed it entirely, toppling the doomed house of her flesh; she fell to the floor. The sword dripped blood, the swordsman was elated. (1563-1569)"
Sometimes the better product makes less profit. It's hard for someone with Capitalistic incentives to respond with a better product if delaying/discouraging/regulating-out-of-existence is cheaper.
I'm aiming at studying Theoretical Cryptography, with an interest in MPC specifically, so this would be right up my alley, but my pessimistic world view tells me that any efforts to create more secure and privacy-preserving services will fail because of institutional opposition and low market demand.
The financial model has to use something like a pay-per-search instead of the usual ad model (although technically even better ads could be served over SMPC!).
If you're interested in studying this you're also probably interested in 1-k Oblivious Transfers (get me a static webpage I request out of a choice of k without revealing which I've requested), in Functional Encryption and also in Securely Obfuscated Programs.
Also, there was a really awesome paper at CRYPTO this year: "How to Use Bitcoin to Design Fair Protocols" (http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/129.pdf)
:)