From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service", emphasis added.
If it's free for you, you're the product.
If it's free for you, you're the product.
So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information?
Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.
It's moot anyway because the answer is out there publicly and no heuristic is needed to resolve it.
Now it's obvious why I've got people calling me asking about my recent loan that may have had PPI or that traumatic car crash I was in a few years ago, even though I've never in my life on both fronts. It's my bloody carrier!
If you use Google, shop in a supermarket, use a mobile phone, have the internet, your data is being collected and, in most cases, being sold to "chosen partners for marketing purposes". Everyone's doing it because they can make money from it.
No. A statement's truth doesn't imply its inverse [1].
It simply means if a company has employees, and they're receiving paychecks, and the money is not coming from you, then it's definitely coming from someone else.
If you are giving them money, it doesn't mean they're not also getting money from somewhere else. But they're less likely to need to do that, especially if it would upset their paying customers.
Situations like this one are exactly why the saying became popular.
There's a difference between ad supported businesses and business that actually directly sell user data behind the scenes.
Equating all the ad-supported businesses with this case is not really fair because the types of businesses you're talking about here are not actually literally selling you out. They are simply pushing you ads on THEIR platform which YOU agreed to use. Sure there are lots of shady things going on in this department as well, but it's a completely different game than what this looks like.
Based on this article it looks like they took your data and actually sold it to a third party, this is different from simply displaying ads on their platform. They literally sold you. And it happened OFF of the platform you signed up for.
A product may be free - and you may still be happy to be the product if you think your attention is being sold, or that they plan to upsell you onto a premium plan.
'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for.
1. Emails with subject [xxx] are opened more often than emails with subject [yyy].
2. Lyft does more business in Scottsdale than we expected.
3. 25% of people who use ridesharing use multiple services and 75% are loyal to one service.
4. 33% of people who don't use ridesharing services also don't use traditional taxi services.
"Nefarious" is a strong word.
I agree with the first half of what you said and disagree with the second. That's precisely the value of the original saying: it's not there to be an excuse for a company, it's there to spread awareness and remind people that they should get informed about just _how_ they're being productized _before_ they have cause to regret using the service.
If more of us scanned the ToS carefully, we might catch the nefarious bits of fuckery on time and pressure the company to change.
Does the privacy policy say your data will be sold to third parties? Great, find out what data, to what third parties and questions like that.
It's still unethical.
People who go to loan shark know exactly what they're getting into--borrowing money.
People who signed up for unroll.me signed up because they got sick of all the the spammers and wanted to get away from all that easily.
Most people including me, thought they would somehow monetize with ads or something like that, but never thought they would sell our info to 3rd parties like this. So No, it wasn't at all obvious what to expect.
The saying "power corrupts" is more correctly expressed as "power attracts the corruptible".