We work at FAANG for free

Nooruddin Shaikh
VIEH Group
Published in
2 min readDec 17, 2020

Imagine a factory where nameless workers are working day and night to produce expensive products. These expensive products are shipped instantly all over the world to a wealthy buyers generating more than $200 millions per day for that factory.

What if I say those worker doesn’t charge a penny to produce such expensive products?

Sounds impossible, right?

But everyone on earth is already doing such tasks for free! YOU ARE FREE LABORER! This is the modern system created by big tech companies.

Big Tech companies such as FAANG provides us the great tools in our hands like Search, Entertainment, Social Connectivity, Productivity, News Feed and many other services where some of them are free as sweet and tell us our lives will be better with them. But in reality those sweet turns out to be poison where we are giving them free labor.

Every time we browse a site, comment, like, subscribe, purchase, connect, surf, scroll, we are just mining the billion dollar gold bars for them. Using such platforms, we are simply generating data on their server which they serves to other big companies to make each other rich. This is the free labor agreement that we all have signed when we entered the internet world. Data goes out, money comes in ($2 Trillion every year). Where is our piece? Aren’t we the ones making the product?

Generating data helps them to provide us the service better but our data is still worth more than that. This data war is a decade old but aren’t we as a consumer making such expensive products for free? So should they pay us? Should we charge them before using internet? Well, here the irony is we are paying the internet bills just to generate the expensive data for free. It’s still debatable topic where user need to understand how their data is worthy, maybe not for them but certainly for such big companies.

After all, in this internet world we are building, our data shouldn’t be distributed for free.

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Nooruddin Shaikh
VIEH Group

Coding enthusiast with a curiosity-driven creative spark! Also loves Science fiction.