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from the you-are-the-product-and-someone-else's-customer dept.
Chances are, everyone here is familiar with the old maxim "If you're not paying for the service, you're the product, not the customer", and if the abundance with which it is uttered is anything to go by, chances are, most people reading this will have agreed with the statement. But Ramez Naam over at The Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies has called this wisdom into question, hilighting the many ways in which the role of users on advertisement driven sites differs strongly from the role of products in more conventional business models.
A list of his bullet points (with explanations excluded from the summary for the sake of keeping it brief) include:
-You can stop using the service. You can deny the company that provides it the revenue you represent.
-You can look around for competitive offerings, and choose one of those.
-You can use the service more… or less.
-You can tell the world how great this service is, how great this company is… Or how awful they are.
-You can make those choices on the basis of utility, or beauty, or privacy, or politics, or morality, or any principle or basis you choose.
-You can change the service itself.
It would seem that the conclusion being drawn here is not so much that you are JUST the customer after all, but that things are a bit more complex than this meme would suggest. Is he onto something? Or just trying to lull us into handing over our data because "we're not actually the product so it's okay"? And does the same apply for other models of distributing free content while generating revenue that may not be advertising based (such as with many distributions of open source software)?
(Score: 2) by khallow on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:58AM
Those three secondary activities are inconsequential compared to search engine-based advertising, their primary source of revenue.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:45AM
For now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by khallow on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:52PM
For forever. There are plenty of businesses and money out there. For example, there's somewhere around 5-10,000 businesses just in the US which trade shares. So trading shares isn't going to magically make Google money when so many others do it too.
Patents are a bit more exclusive, but a lot of other companies have them too. And they have a short shelf life of 17 years.
And there's a vast number of parties who can manipulate elections. What makes Google special?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:37PM
Nothing's forever.
Research. From which something original may result. May change the primary source of income for Google.
(apologies for the confusion, I was replying only to search engine-based advertising, their primary source of revenue. part)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford