"Free" Internet Services

Last weekend a friend of mine told me she was amazed that a website she frequents was completely free to use despite all the things they offer! I'll try and keep this post unbiased and won't directly state the name of the site for professional reasons but for the purposes of this post, we'll call them "Smoogle."

I would normally be impressed by a company who does everything that "Smoogle" does if they offered it for free but that's the issue, they don't. You may not have to fork over a bunch of money for their services but you pay in other ways. I realize that sounds super ominous and it kind of is. Especially with how these companies and sites actually do make most of their money. They may sell services, or products, or features, or media, but their biggest revenue stream isn't anything that you get or can see. The hottest product that they are selling...is you.

Okay I'll break this down but first let's talk about digital identity for a moment by starting with a fun thought experiment.

Let's say a magical wizard offers you a sweet deal. (Bare with me here)

He will give you all the known knowledge in the world if you allow him to read your mind in a limited capacity. All he is asking is that he can keep tabs on everything you are thinking. He absolutely promises he won't actually read your thoughts though since that would be an invasion of your privacy. Instead, he only wants to know when you are thinking about something and where you are when you are thinking about it. Sounds not terrible huh? All the endless knowledge in the world and in exchange a wizard gets to know when and where you are when you think about puppies. You ask him why cause you're an inquisitive person...

"Oh don't worry, I just want to better assist you in getting the information you are looking for to you faster."

You sign on the dotted line without hesitation cause it sounds amazing.

Congratulations! You now have all the known knowledge at your fingertips! You settle arguments between friends like a champ, you know where the best tacos are in town, you know the fastest way to get to work, you know when the big sports match is this weekend and who is playing down to the player. Knowledge is now your superpower!!

Then let's say one day you are walking down the street and a person walks right up to you. They offer you a sweet deal on tacos to your favorite taco shop!! How did they know?! Later on, another person walks up to you and asks if you want a discount ticket to go see your favorite sports team. Okay this is getting weird. What is happening?

I'll tell you. The wizard sold all your data to advertising companies. He may not have known that you purchased a chicken burrito with extra salsa, but he knew you went to the taco shop a lot. He may not have known who your favorite sports team was, but he knew when you were looking up stats and scores. That data cross-referenced with the games time made it pretty easy to figure it out.

This is what companies like "Smoogle" do. They take the data you create by going about your daily life so they can sell it to people who want to sell you stuff. They are pretty dang good at it too. With a monopoly of data collecting methods, they can see most aspects of your life pretty easily. This creates a pretty complete profile of who you are which can be sold off to companies who want to sell you stuff.

It's not always about selling you something either!! They could sell your data profile to research companies, governments, other data collecting technologies...all without your direct permission.

How?!?

Remember that end user agreement you said "I agree" to? Of course you don't, you didn't read it cause it was 3 million pages and sounded like gibberish. Yeah that's where you agreed to this.

They don't always ask like they should though. An example of this is when Facebook and Cambridge Analytica got into some trouble back in 2018 for harvesting data of millions of Facebook users without permission. Read about it here.

Why am I telling you all this though? This isn't a call to arms, this isn't a demand to stop using your favorite service, this isn't even a complaint. It's an awareness campaign. You should know that free doesn't actually mean free when you are the product. Maybe just scroll through that agreement before you hit agree. You don't have to know everything, just look for the heading labeled something like "How we use your data" or look for their privacy policy.

At the end of the day, it's your life and your data. If you don't care then so be it. I just thought you should know.