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Nest plans to offer its smart thermostat to Irish consumers for free when they sign up for a two-year contract with Electric Ireland. Nest chief executive Tony Fadell said at the Web Summit in Dublin that the deal could put his company’s thermostats in up to 1.6 million homes, according to CNET, and claimed that similar deals would be announced for other countries in the future.
[...] Google is infamous for its ability to offer consumers products which are paid for not by their users but by the ads those users see. Its products are among the best in their categories, and when it’s free to use them, there’s little reason for consumers to pay for another service. Now Google is just applying that same logic to the real world — and it will probably work out for it just as well.
Even I’ve grown sick of hearing this sentiment, but it’s more relevant now than ever: If you aren’t the one paying for a service, you are the product.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @03:41AM
If you aren’t the one paying for a service, you are the product
And, if you are paying boatloads of money for the service (like Verizon wireless and their fat 33% profit margin [forbes.com]), you are still the product since Verizon will sell off your privacy by planting supercookies on your web traffic [soylentnews.org] for ad targeting. So, you can't pay your way out of getting screwed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by davester666 on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:42AM
and it's not just the 'big boys'
every fitness widget, mileage tracker for your car or other gizmo that connects to your phone, even though your phone is powerful enough to process and present you with the results immediately, instead, the device makers app helpfully forces you [otherwise, the widget does NOTHING for you] to create an account on their web site, uploads your data to their web site, and then promptly rents your data to every tom, dick and harry that happens to walk by with a dollar [of course, it is incompetently anonymized].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07 2014, @03:06AM
Yeah, it turns out, even if you're paying, most services are selling your data, so unless it is a company like google that specifically doesn't sell your data, you're the product, even if you're also paying for a product or service too.
It is so funny that this gets trotted out whenever people see the name "google," since they are one of the only companies who aren't selling your data.
The problem with the cliche is that once it becomes cliche and you start repeating it whenever the situation comes up, by then you're not thinking in terms of the actual issue, and lose sight of if it even applies or not. He should probably realize that if he's sick of hearing something, he should just not say it, and say something intelligent instead. Or at least make an attempt at faking it.
How about, "unless the privacy policy says you're not the product, you are; even if you paid money." This one is so much more true, and doesn't falsely accuse everything that is free of lacking privacy.