[AnthonyMouse]

There are individual-level consequences, but it's a macro-level problem. Doing the right thing costs less in the short term but more in the long term. But then someone quotes the Keynesian dodge ("in the long run we are all dead") as if humans will be extinct before we have to pay the piper, as if we're talking about billion year timescales rather than a few years or months.

And maybe we're back to the information asymmetry. People don't connect the fact that using Facebook's VPN could make them have to pay more for groceries than the cost of just paying for a different VPN, so they use it, and it costs them more than they expect it to, and after being multiplied by a thousand things like that, they don't understand why they have so much more debt than their parents did. The fact that the two are related hasn't really entered the public consciousness.

But it's not at the level of company-to-software-developer, it's at the level of customer-to-company. Companies can already tell what kind of developers they're employing. Companies know when they're selling out. But customers generally don't know that about companies.

It's like the whole religious war between Apple and Google. Is Android or iOS the best phone for user privacy? Trick question. It's PureOS. But most people aren't even aware of the possibility of that.