Exactly, although, the involuntary part for most, lies in the fact that they didn’t read the EULA.
EULA’s are garbage for a lot of reason, and they have lots of problem. I would argue (but the government would not) that most of thise are unenforcable, bad-faith contracts. But that’s not the point.
If the EULA for Facebook was:
We can do whatever we want with any and all of your data. You can’t use any of our services if you don’t consent.
People still would, because those services provide an insane amount of value, which is something people seem to forget about when talking about privacy. The black and white thinking that pervades our social and political discourse these days applies to this, too.
You can see it even in the people who think a bit more critically about privacy. The “get paid for using your data” that inspired this post often fails to directly address a critical question - how much (in real currency values) is your privacy worth?
You can get a privacy-respecting email account with Kolab Now for less than $5 a month, using your own domain, and if you don’t like their service you can download the source code and take your data elsewhere. It’s all open source. But Gmail is still the biggest email provider, and even among people who see that as a problem, Protonmail and Riseup aren’t uncommon.
A much more real, practical problem is that people aren’t willing to pay trivial sums of money for services that are extremely valuable.
Spotify gives you access to nearly all the music ever created in a searchable, curated platform, and the majority of users are willing to pay nothing for that. People are perfectly okay using the Netflix account of their friend or family member, even though they spend half of their waking life watching it.
On the internet, you pay for things with money (by being the customer) or you pay for things with data (by being the product), and things that aren’t paid for go away.
It’s a basic economics, which is something fewer and fewer people on the internet seem to grasp.