Clicking on those "Accept Cookies" notices was already annoying, but now it's become a daily reminder of how that smug Bryan Caplan knows Hubski better than Hubski knows itself. Aside from the macho schoolyard language and attacks on the author's character (which, I admit, he did not say would not happen), Caplan perfectly predicted Hubski's response.

In this short essay, he made just a few simple claims.

Technology companies provide us with great benefits.

No one earnestly disputed this claim. The fact that the conversation occurred on an online platform is suggestive. Travel agents still exist, but people overwhelmingly choose to book online. The postal service exists, but people prefer e-mail. Telephone service exists, but people send electronic messages. Bank tellers exist, but people check their balance at home. Taxis exist, booksellers exist, etc. etc.

"Undercutting" is simply a pejorative way of saying "offering a better deal."

Yet the people who benefit from tech companies mostly complain about them.

What better example of "searching for dark linings in the silver clouds of business progress" could you ask for than a comment, quite as long as the article itself, finding fault with each tech company mentioned, one by one?

Big Data was the main point of contention. Caplan is quite clear on the costs and benefits tech companies have brought to data aggregation and privacy:

Benefits:

For practical purposes, we have more privacy than ever before in human history. You can now buy embarrassing products in secret. You can read or view virtually anything you like in secret. You can interact with over a billion people in secret.

Costs:

Then what privacy have we lost? The privacy to not be part of a Big Data Set. The privacy to not have firms try to sell us stuff based on our previous purchases.

If your values put the costs greater than the benefits, quit Facebook and don't shop at Amazon. If your favorite local shop closed under pressure from internet sales, sorry, but the vast majority of people prefer to shop at the online store that has a neurotic obsession with pleasing customers with incomparable convenience, vast selection, and low prices.

Why are these companies keeping track of our data, anyway? It was creepy when Target figured out that a teen girl was pregnant before her father knew.

We all know what motivates corporations: profit. But that's just the beginning of the explanation. Profit comes from revenue, and revenue comes from customers. Customer demand is the best explanation for corporate behavior. People pay tech firms to collect and aggregate personal data so their ads will be better targeted.

Facebook made more than $40 billion in revenue in 2017, approximately 89 percent of which came from digital advertisements.