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cykros writes:

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)?