That's a great question.
The thing I always tell my students is that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Even though it appears that you're getting these services for free, if it's an advertising-supported model of some kind, you're paying for that when you purchase goods or services later on.
Most of the platforms we're talking about in the social media realm run as multisided marketplaces. It is quite difficult to keep everybody happy. As I alluded to, you're trying to keep the advertisers happy, but the advertisers want as much information as possible about the users. The users just want to be left alone to use the platform, but they also don't necessarily want to pay for it. That's never a popular thing, except maybe in some online streaming contexts when you're looking at services like Spotify or Netflix. However, even in the subscription-based models, a company like Netflix, which isn't necessarily doing the same sort of data harvesting that companies like Meta or Alphabet are doing, is also gathering data on how the users use the platform and deploying AI for recommendation systems, etc.
There's always an economic imperative for the advertisers to demand more data; therefore, the platform operators will harvest more data. I think that speaks to the need for the government to step in and say, “Well, here are the enumerated rights that we consider, such as privacy for citizens.” I don't just mean including it in a preamble, but actually putting those in legal tests, so—