Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.
> Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide something and people choose whether they want to buy it or use it.
That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it. Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price.
The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can. Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.
> People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame it as something illicit going on.
Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.
> The fact still remains that if people cared about their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't use these sites.
They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.
> Store cards used to track purchases and spending habits in store in the same way that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and customers were given vouchers in return.
In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.
> Pretending otherwise is passing the buck.
I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.
(But then I'm willing to cut these business folks some slack too; in many cases, it's the market pressures that force to choose the abusive option - which leads us back to my original point: the market is a capitalist greed optimization engine. It promotes business people who think that, much like your margin, your ethics are their opportunity.)
