Occam hits the nail on the head - those with valuable data will pay, the value of "privacy" is not a long tail graph, it's a diminishing return.
So the products for the poor are subsidized by the information of the able at a cost to everyone. That doesn't feel sustainable to me - we're barely twenty years into the Google era, and how many hours have been wasted opting out of tracking? How many useful things could have been created for a dollar per user instead of mesothelioma ads?
That the indigent get 'free' service is a byproduct of the fact that companies abuse everyone else to subsidize it.
"Your" data may be worth a buck, but to the right person, targeting "you" is worth a fortune - the value you extract from your Gmail address is the same, the value they extract is not.
