I think most people do the cost benefit analysis in a much more empirical manner than your theoretical framework. Most everybody has a justifiable reinforced be

I think most people do the cost benefit analysis in a much more empirical manner than your theoretical framework. Most everybody has a justifiable reinforced belief that trading data for value is worth it, since the vast majority of people don't feel like they've been on the losing side when they participated in these transactions before. One can argue that these people may not have understood that a transaction was occurring. I would argue that this is beside the point. Their intuition is hard to discredit in the face of their lived experience. Aside from the marketing spam, most people are probably right in thinking that they've been better off with Google/<alternative> than without. We can pontificate that people should know more about what they agreed to, and so on, if only they knew better, etc. But this rings hollow and very hypothetical to the vast majority of us. It's worrisome in thought exercises, but not validated in real life.