The word innovation gets thrown around a lot in tech circles. It’s slapped on product updates, pitch decks, investor decks, keynote speeches — often without much scrutiny.
But here’s a hard truth:
If your business model only works by extracting value from users without their informed consent, it’s not innovation. It’s exploitation.
And we’ve reached a point where the distinction matters more than ever.
Optimization vs. exploitation
Most exploitative business models don’t look predatory at first glance. They disguise themselves as improvements, upgrades, or clever optimizations:
- “We’re increasing engagement.”
- “We’re personalizing experiences.”
- “We’re reducing friction.”
In reality, these aren’t just design decisions — they are incentive structures. Behind them are hidden trade-offs: asymmetry in information, delayed costs, and risk shifted to users without their clear understanding.
Contrast that with approaches that genuinely reduce risk. For example, in why free online services aren’t free, we explored how hidden costs accumulate when the price isn’t transparent. The difference between transparency and obfuscation is not trivial — it’s foundational.
Consent becomes ceremonial without alternatives
A common defense of opaque systems is: “Users agreed to the terms.”
But consent only matters when refusal is a real option.
Today, many digital services position themselves as essential. If you want to interact online — to communicate, to work, to learn — you’re often forced into opaque agreements. That kind of consent is ceremonial at best.
This dynamic is closely related to what we discussed in the long-term consequences of ignoring digital privacy: when users don’t fully control their data, harm doesn’t always show up immediately — but it compounds over time.
Growth often hides harm in plain sight
When growth becomes the dominant metric, danger creeps in quietly.
Products that scale rapidly tend to accumulate complexity, data, and permission creep faster than security and user autonomy can keep up. That’s exactly what we unpacked in how growth-driven products quietly increase user risk — a narrative that connects expansion with hidden extensions of risk.
Growth isn’t inherently bad, but when it’s unmoored from user respect, it becomes a mechanism for exploitation.
And once exploitation is baked into the growth machine, reversing course becomes “expensive” or “impractical,” even if everyone quietly acknowledges the damage.
Clever systems aren’t the same as good systems
There’s a temptation in tech to equate cleverness with progress.
A system that predicts behavior, nudges attention, or optimizes engagement may appear smart — but smart doesn’t mean ethical. Dark patterns can boost metrics while degrading user autonomy. What looks like sophistication on the surface can be coercion underneath.
This distinction mirrors the difference between superficial security measures and real protection. In security theater vs real protection, we pointed out how visible controls often reassure without actually reducing risk. Similarly, visible “innovations” sometimes mask structures that extract value without delivering proportional user benefit.
Trust isn’t a byproduct — it’s a prerequisite
Users don’t abandon products because of a single bug. They leave when they feel they were misled or taken for granted. That’s a theme central to why users abandon products they don’t trust.
Exploitation corrodes trust. Innovation earns it.
Real innovation doesn’t reduce a user’s autonomy or obscure the cost of participation. Instead, it clarifies value, aligns incentives, and enhances agency.
Innovation that doesn’t cost agency
Some business models don’t require extraction to work. They reward users for participation. They make trade-offs explicit. They treat user autonomy as a design constraint, not a negotiable asset.
That’s the kind of model that earns trust and builds longevity — the subject we touched on in why we don’t chase growth at any cost. Growth that compromises autonomy or depends on deferred costs ultimately erodes the foundation upon which sustainable products are built.
If a business only succeeds by obscuring its true costs, relying on information asymmetry, or benefiting from user complacency, it isn’t innovative — it’s exploitative.
Calling that innovation does a disservice to the word.
And more importantly, it does a disservice to users.