“If you're not paying for the product, you are the product” is hogwash

On a further note, no, we're not ever going to love google anymore. Google is a huge multinational corporation that is beholden to its shareholders. That's just what happens when you get that big. We're not going to praise you for being moral, we're just going to use your products, and you're going to profit from it. That's the deal.

But, I'm not convinced that the users are the customers no matter how much care they are treated with. The money that keeps the data centers lit comes from advertisers who are are buying users' attention.

Regardless of whether Google's users are its "product", I'd maintain that Google's customers are the people who give them money in exchange for a product or service (that's the general usage of the term "customer"). These would be mostly the people who buy ads, since selling ads is by far Google's largest source of revenue.

"Even Ads is viewed as a service to our users. Random ads are garbage. Useful ads are a benefit."

If I were a Gmail user, how would "useful" ads enhance my use of Gmail? They're a distraction to getting work done. I don't go to my e-mail when I'm interested in shopping for something, and I'm pretty sure that most other people don't either. In fact, I pay money to use an e-mail provider who does not show me ads.

Imagine a farmer who cares very much about his animals, so much so that he is willing to accept a lower profit margin for the sake of his animals' well-being. The animals' happiness is always his first priority. I'd probably buy milk and meat from such a farmer.

It's not necessarily a bad experience to be a product. When winter comes, being a product of an ethical company is probably much more convenient than being a free, wild animal. But that doesn't change the fact that you're a product. You're just a happy, well-fed product. Sooner or later, it's off to the butcher with you.

The only sense in which users of Google's free services might be construed as "customers" is that we're purchasing those services with our fingers, eyeballs and personal information. Maybe that's true. But even if it is, that doesn't change the fact that Google takes our payment (fingers and eyeballs) and uses it in turn to pay advertisers. As long as Ads are in the picture, we can never be 100% customers. We'll always be both product and customer, as @seizethecheese said in a different comment.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" has been repeated so much on the internet that it has become a sort of cliche. But just because it's a cliche doesn't mean that it doesn't contain any grains of truth.

Only when you imagine that a company can only have one product, does this dichotomy make sense. Google operates a system in which there are multiple products and customers. One could even arguably say that advertisers are the product in the sense that they provide users with patronage for their free searches.

I edited my post to not be smarmy here, but this is just flat out wrong and I don't need to reiterate how google works. Brian, I believe you believe what you wrote. Until you and your privacy concerned co-workers get together to surface a "delete all stored data on me and opt out" button, I'm going to think you've let your close relationship with google warp your perspective and allow you to draw faulty conclusions on how far up your attitudes permeate.

Nice try.

The author here might not believe that, but somewhere up his management chain are people who do, and I'm quite sure the shareholders to whom the senior managers are accountable do.

I admire the grass roots sentiment here, but this was written by someone who has the luxury of being technical and not responsible for making money for the business. Try asking Eric Schmidt how he feels about privacy if you want to see how the big business guys at Google really think.

The part that does make money, the advertising part, has advertisers as customers. And their product is the entire internet on which to show those ads, including all the users of the internet.

You still get to see those ads even if you don't use GMail or YouTube. Even if you don't use search; Google ads are on all sorts of sites. Basically, they just want as many people as possible spending as much time as possible on the internet. The bigger the internet is, the bigger the pie of which Google gets a sizable slice.

Lot's of assumptions in there, like the implication that an ad could be a good thing, that it could be 'useful' if its catering to you as a consumer I mean customer. We are definitely the product, offered to advertisers like sheep to the slaughter, but I suppose sheepherders do feed and provide shelter before they sacrifice you. If you think that's win win win for all involved, there are some serious moral lapses occurring in your reasoning.