Ask HN: How can I best respond to “If the product is free, you are the product” | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I best respond to “If the product is free, you are the product”

4 pointsMarkurSens8 comments

I'm having a hard time with this. Whenever a data "scandal" comes up, there are always people that oversimplify things and just throw something along the lines of "what did you expect? You're not paying for the product, you are the product".

I'm a data scientist myself, and I know how and why this is wrong but, what are some simple & powerful arguments I can lay to non-tech people?

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How is it wrong? We are the product when there is no product. If people don't share on facebook, facebook doesn't exist, hence people are the product. Same with Twitter. They sell information and access to the people using the platform to corporations, hence the people are the product.

Frankly, this isn't a new concept, people are at least part of the product in almost every business that sells data or "insights". Credit reporting agencies, hello we don't pay for it (except to see our own data which is perverse), but we are the product. Acxiom and similar companies, we are 100% the product and they collect all our data through sources in the public domain and through buying access and then reselling "insights" about us, which makes us the product.

If you go to a big box store and do a survey with one of those people walking around that give you a $10 off or whatever, you are the product, they are selling your data and "insights".

I don't think there needs to be a comeback for the point that "people are the product", it is a fact and there isn't necessarily anything "wrong" with that, it just should not be hidden or denied IMO.

Why is it "oversimplification"? In the long run, it's true.

If it's not a charity, _you_ will be bearing the cost, one way or another. Your attention will be sold to other people. So yes, you are the product.

How else can you monetize a big project if not at the expense of its users?

I don't see how it is wrong as a maxim. Sure there are cases where the products don't turn on the users because they are sustainable or have received enough funding/backing to last for a while before having to seek for alternative forms of monetization, but otherwise we know operational costs for products need to be met somehow, and the way to do this while still having a broad consumer base is to not charge the customer directly but to profit off of them by selling data or inferences drawn from said data.

What do you want? Convince people? You cannot.

The irony is, that many paid services gather the same amount of data.

In my point of view, this is a feature. Building services around KPIs is not the worst thing companies should do.

Why do you care what other people think or mean when they repeat that? Trying to persuade strangers that they're wrong about an opinion seems quixotic.

Ok, let us start:

How and why is it wrong?

Make your case, however not simple. This will be powerful.

Once we have that, simple can happen easily.

Your turn.

The best response would be "the product isn't free".

"Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior."

From "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff

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