It’s possible for someone to care about privacy but not have the means to do anything about it.
The fact that $7.50 a month _is_ cost prohibitive for some people is the point of the article.
That's even more true globally.
And yes, Netflix is hard on some people too. I know plenty of people not in the software engineer class who (illegally) share Netflix subscriptions or don't have them at all.
Even that seems like a minefield where you might hire someone that sells you overpriced junk.
But everything you mentioned sounds like maintaining privacy. What’s the time/domain knowledge cost of scrubbing all the crap that’s already there through umpteen opt-outs?
Would make sense if a government body set up a website advising you what to do, or just make a lot of this crap completely illegal, but that would require a massive donation.
His theory seems to be that if you have a bunch of these, they will add up. Maybe, but I can't buy the argument without more and better examples to back it up.
I mean, if you had Protonmail and a $5/mo VPN, you'd still be spending less than the cost of a standard Netflix subscription. And if you stopped subscribing to Netflix because you cared about privacy, you'd be SAVING money.
He does bring up a good point, which is that you need to have a certain amount of technical fluency to do this stuff. The other example he lists is the Pi-hole: does he think the cost of a $35 Raspberry Pi is what's keeping most people from running this software? That's not it at all: it's the obscurity of the project, and the knowledge it takes to set it up. There are plenty of people in the world for whom $35 is a big expense, but the number of people who are prevented from using one because of the cost is very low.