Comment by akerl_

> If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.

This paragraph is so tantalizingly close to putting its finger on the issue. The fact that a company found someone willing to do a job for what they want to pay does not mean that it's ethical or moral for them to do so.

In this case (as in many others), one of the predicates was finding groups of people whose existing options, financial literacy, living conditions, or some combination of the three were already so bad that becoming digital serfs was a minor step up.