November 21, 2016. I once heard Leo Laporte say in the course of one of his podcasts netcasts that if you use a service and can’t tell someone what that service’s product is (in regard to making money), you, the user, are the product. As I think that through, there is a lot of truth in that. Philosophically, Facebook’s product may be a platform to connect people and enable the spread of information, but in a practical/business sense, their product is you. Their money is made by getting advertisers to buy ads. Advertisers buy ads as a way of buying your attention and time. In a very way, you are the product while advertisers are the customers.

This by itself is not negative. Advertising can truly be beneficial to a person, connecting that person with a legitimate need or want to a quality source for filling the need/want. Advertising is likely more often benign, with a person making an acceptable and small trade of attention for no reward (from the ad or advertiser), but can also be varying levels of negative, by greatly distracting or even offending the person seeing the ad.

Most concerns regarding advertising though are not focused on what you give up in attention, time, or efficiency. A greater concern for many comes from the privacy trades you may have to make.

There are extreme examples, such as AT&T and Verizon using “supercookies” to track user’s habits for better targeting ads, and browser extensions  are one easy way for your habits and actions to be tracked. Even if you think you are being careful about what sort of digital trail you are leaving, things like browser fingerprints and the tracking or logging done by your service provider may make you think otherwise.

Tracking of activity and habits is not necessarily bad or is at least not bad in itself. If we are going to have services or content provided which is made possible by advertising revenue, there is a certain logic in trying to make sure those ads are as useful as possible, so being served ads that are targeted to the user become more appealing.

Additionally, “Artificial Intelligence” with bots, virtual assistants, and machine learning is the focus of many large tech companies. These new technologies are dependent on large quantities of user data being available to learn from.

What’s the takeaway from all of this?

Someone has to pay for the sites and services you use online. When given the option, consider paying instead of always looking for the free option.

Most of all, educate yourself about the products you use and weigh what you get vs. what you give up.