Whether it's targeted ads, or training AI on their data, or verifying their age and implicitly identity, or "fraud defense", most people happily take it in exchange for a convenient freebie which is why things keep escalating.
It's understandable, people are assaulted with all kinds of abuses from every direction. There are more immediate threats that they can grasp more easily so this stuff has to wait its turn.
Or don't approach the world with a fundamental mindset of having agency to (help) fix things they see as broken. Just because people see something as bad doesn't mean they inherently see a bright flashing line from that to "so I should do something about it rather than accept it".
The prime recent example of this is gamers. I've seen many people say a version of this: "I tried Linux before but it was too complicated/didn't run most games/when I ran into something I had no idea how to solve it, so I just went straight back to Windows. Now I installed Bazzite cause I was fed up with Win11 and I'm super happy with it. If I do run into a problem I just ask AI and it solves it".
I've genuinely seen dozens of comments similar to this. The fact is that there needs to be a very convenient and user-friendly alternative ready to go for the moment that some people do start to care. You need both just as much as each other. And until very recently, those alternatives didn't exist, not at the level of convenience required.
