We Are the Product
The internet has become a place where we consume free content and enjoy services free of charge. Business models have accommodated to include this trend. It has been a long and arduous process where creators and vendors have been shoved into creating revenue with these free offerings in different and creative ways. As a result, information has become a currency for the management of those platforms, and those which were traditionally the consumers have become the product of the services.
Have you ever wondered how a free service is sustainable? Who pays all of the storage space your photos and videos take up in Facebook? How could a free messaging service such as WhatsApp or Messenger stay free forever without you paying for the service? Without a doubt, those services require infrastructure, developers to continue evolving the product and fix bugs, marketing teams so the service’s customer base grows and legal teams to manage lawsuits and patents that protect the core idea of the product. The list could go on endlessly and I am certain that such gargantuan services and companies are not cheap to run. Obviously, the companies providing us with these free services are not charities, but how do they turn a profit to the point of generating some of the largest private fortunes in the world? The answer is simple but has complex underlying implications. Their business model is geared towards gathering, managing and selling information. The user’s data which is later processed and afterwards sold as useful information to other companies who are willing to sell their own products.
Digital advertising
The digital advertising business model emerged the moment the internet became available to all. As traditional advertising models became inefficient and extremely expensive, marketing teams ought to look for different strategies to promote their businesses and products. Angela Hausman says that more than 96% percent of live TV viewers skip commercials when they can and the way we’re watching our favorite shows, movies and sports games is changing. New players such as Twitter or Facebook are fighting for licenses to broadcast popular sports events and ‘traditional’ TV providers are losing viewers, advertisers and influence over what is trending in the industry.
The new advertising model supports the sites where people spend most of their time while surfing the web, social networks and content viewing platforms. Furthermore, those ads are shown to younger audiences, who are the most avid consumers of digital content. Therefore, companies could get a better return value for each ad campaign they launch with the newest model.
Without a doubt, this has become a new opportunity for marketers and internet site owners to increase their profits and sustain their product offerings. But how does this affect the consumer and normal internet user?
What we have become
It may seem as if our life has completely changed as we have become more dependent on the internet and computers. Especially after smartphone usage has become ubiquitous and, in a sense, absolutely necessary to carry on with our everyday lives. These devices make our everyday tasks simpler for certain but, as with everything else, they present their own setbacks.
Our data is open
I firmly believe that your identity is now fully exposed. Your name has been written across online services and social networks. You can’t delete your name as you are now a member of the connected world. Online forms constantly ask for more information that amount to your digital footprint. It sometimes may seem as harmless but every bit of information about yourself works as a tool that companies may use to offer you products and services.
You may think that most of the time you have been careful and have not disclose so much information about yourself. While that may be true, our digital footprint is mostly conformed of metadata and our patterns. These two elements are enough for companies to understand and have a complete perspective of our behaviour, interests and personality. It is all about context. You may be using an encrypted messaging application to communicate with your friends, but with all the metadata those messages produce we could assume many things. Perhaps knowing who your best friend is, who your colleagues are and who are the members of your family may not be difficult at all. After all, metadata includes the time of the day you communicate the most with someone, what type of files you share and the frequency of your communications. For an entity analyzing the patterns of millions of users, knowing the actual content of a single conversation is irrelevant. It may seem unnecessary to have the exact conversation.
Companies trying to sell you their products are not looking to know about yourself, but merely to understand the basic underlying patterns of your behaviour. Facebook and Google sell this general information to their customers. (1. The real customers are the advertisers who are willing to pay for Google’s and Facebook’s offerings.) When someone is investing their resources into an ad about their products or services, it is imperative to understand their target audience. That is merely a convenient oversimplification of how the system works. Advertising is the most important income for Facebook and Google. To the former it amounts to approximately 97% of the total 2016 revenue according to Facebook’s yearly report. That may be just a glimpse to show how important this business model is for the industry.
Your information has become an important asset for these companies who depend on the advertising business model.
We are the product
Many of the social network and internet users believe that they are the customers. They believe that they are completely protected by the provider and everything in the product they use is designed to protect them in the end. While that may be tangentially correct, as it is in the service provider’s best interest to provide a robust product to attract more users, it is a convenient delusion most of the time. When using a free service we are not the first in line, we are merely a product from which companies maintain their businesses. We have to adhere to the terms and usage policy inherent to the service and can only play within the guidelines provided when we set up an account. As it is not humanly possible to read all the terms and conditions when setting up every new account, we are not always aware of the setbacks of using each product. In other words, we don’t fully understand the rules of the game. While I am not suggesting that we meticulously read all the terms and conditions of the services we use, we must take into consideration all the major guidelines that we are accepting and enable or disable all of those settings that directly affect our privacy.
If you are not in complete agreement with those play rules, you should not sign up and use the product. It is extremely important to understand this concept. Service providers have no obligation to protect your rights or take into consideration your desires. As a product you have no right to change the game conditions. It is all intrinsic to the rules of the internet and the advertising business model.
What you should do
It is very difficult to change our internet usage habits. Moreover, our digital footprint is an ever-expanding entity that we cannot delete. Sometimes we have no choice other than to accept the terms that service providers establish. Unfortunately, it is not always a personal decision either. For example, you may not agree with Instagram’s terms of service; however, you may miss out on many useful features and contact with your friends if you decide not to sign up. We are liable to agreeing to those conditions of service if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. That is why it is nigh impossible to escape from services that are already well established, such as Facebook, Google, Instagram and Snapchat. We have no other choice. Nevertheless, fatalism is not the way to go about changing things.
Talk about it
The best thing we can do to change how everything is already set up is to talk about it. We must make it viral. Talk with your friends and family about the topic. Don’t stay quiet. This is the same reason we’re creating this publication. Convince everyone who is interested in the topic that this is an important issue. It is troubling that, most of the time, I get weird looking faces when mentioning privacy concerns.
Avoid troubling services
Whenever you have the chance to use a different provider that takes care of your privacy and does not track you all along, use it. There are many options to choose from. The company who made the private and secure search engine DuckDuckGo created this list to improve your security and privacy.
Disclose the least information you can
All internet forms have fields that are not mandatory. If you are not willing to disclose all the information they ask you to disclose, don’t do it. For example, Facebook has the option to register your place of residence. It is not necessary to give this information if you don’t want to. The less you tell about yourself, the less those companies have to make a product out of you.
Beware of the others
One of the greatest problems regarding privacy is the interaction between other users. Most of the time, other users are the ones who disclose information about ourselves. For example, sometimes friends tag you in their Facebook photos. That is a lot of information. If Facebook already knows where your friend lives, they can easily make a cross-reference and imply that you live in the same city as your friend. In general, tell your friends that you are not willing to be tagged in their photos. Moreover, don’t tag your friends as well.
As our digital lives become more crowded with services that cover all imaginable areas, the risk of losing control over our data is higher. We have countless of different accounts and have accepted hundreds of terms of service and conditions to use these utilities. With that in mind, we should never forget that most of those services rely on the advertising business model, which means that we are not the end costumer because we are merely a user. I have dubbed it “becoming a product”. That is why it is of uttermost important to become fully aware of the dangers and implications that all “free” services inherently bring with their help. Every time you are offered a free product, you should think twice before signing up.
Don’t become an average product. Never stop talking about it or being careful about it. Become a user, not someone else’s product.
