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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> Increasingly, the "if you're not paying then you're the product" saying is bunk. I am paying, almost $400 per month, for quite a few SIMs to be active on T-Mobile's network yet that's not enough. They have to harvest data about me for even more.

I think the corrected slogan would be:

If you're not paying, you're certainly the product. If you are paying, you still might be.

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At this rate, the saying might as well be "if you don't own the company, you're the product". I can't imagine this sort of scumbaggery would fly with a carrier that's, say, a customer-owned cooperative.

who owns any of those companies? the shareholders. are they treated any better?

the issue is the spectrum auctions.. a new carrier can't even get off the ground, even if they were willing to fight through the morass of local and competing regulations to put up towers etc.

> who owns any of those companies? the shareholders. are they treated any better?

They don't have to be, because shareholders and customers are two separate groups when it comes to traditional corporations. And even where they intersect, if dividends and growing stock prices outweigh any personal harm done to themselves as customers, they're going to take the money, every time.

Paying a company doesn’t meaningfully affect their incentives to sell your information or not.

The slogan is correct. But your version is probably easier to interpret correctly by most people.

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