I disagree about what the bare minimum is. It’s not uninformed. They tell you about it, and tell you you can opt out. I don’t really see how that would be them doing it without permission.

The right thing is to make it opt-in for everyone

How is that the right thing? I’m directly challenging this claim.

All I said was that free users cost them money, so it’s reasonable for them to try to recover those costs. I never claimed that free users are a drain on them, so I won’t even respond to the rest of your comment.

This may be controversial, but trying to collect the data of your free users to offset the costs of the infrastructure/resources needed to support the free users is not a bad thing - especially when you give those users an option to opt-out.

You make it sound like their goal is to do bad things. That’s not true. Corporations are not good or evil, they are amoral. They don’t care if what they are doing is good or bad - it just matters if they make money.

they’re free to just do the right thing completely

What exactly would that entail?

A more charitable interpretation is that they are arguing that we don’t need to impose any new traffic regulations to stop that specific incident from happening because running red lights is already against the law. Not that I agree