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>If it's free for you, you're the product. So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your inform

>If it's free for you, you're the product. So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.

abritishguy 10y ago
But if you aren't paying then they must be making money elsewhere.
gdulli 10y ago
If X then Y doesn't imply anything about not-X, but that doesn't mean it's less useful for describing X. It's moot anyway because the answer is out there publicly and no heuristic is needed to resolve it.
jwdunne 10y ago
In the UK, O2 has a line in their terms and conditions that pretty much say they're allowed to sell your data to 3rd parties. Now it's obvious why I've got people calling me asking about my recent loan that may have had PPI or that traumatic car crash I was in a few years ago, even though I've never in my life on both fronts. It's my bloody carrier! If you use Google, shop in a supermarket, use a mobile phone, have the internet, your data is being collected and, in most cases, being sold to "chosen partners for marketing purposes". Everyone's doing it because they can make money from it.
rosser 10y ago
Whether I'm paying for a service is orthogonal to what its ToS allows them to do with my data. When I'm not paying for it, you can be pretty confident the ToS explicitly allows it, with even money on its being phrased in abstrusely arcane legalese. They have to make money somehow...
goflyapig 10y ago
So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? No. A statement's truth doesn't imply its inverse [1]. It simply means if a company has employees, and they're receiving paychecks, and the money is not coming from you, then it's definitely coming from someone else. If you are giving them money, it doesn't mean they're not also getting money from somewhere else. But they're less likely to need to do that, especially if it would upset their paying customers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent
- mrlatinos 10y ago
  This is implying that you're able to prove that all free products sell/profit from your data.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I think the idea is to help you think about the free services that you use and your privacy, not be a perfect way to describe every free service.

abritishguy 10y ago

But if you aren't paying then they must be making money elsewhere.

gdulli 10y ago

If X then Y doesn't imply anything about not-X, but that doesn't mean it's less useful for describing X. It's moot anyway because the answer is out there publicly and no heuristic is needed to resolve it.

jwdunne 10y ago

In the UK, O2 has a line in their terms and conditions that pretty much say they're allowed to sell your data to 3rd parties. Now it's obvious why I've got people calling me asking about my recent loan that may have had PPI or that traumatic car crash I was in a few years ago, even though I've never in my life on both fronts. It's my bloody carrier! If you use Google, shop in a supermarket, use a mobile phone, have the internet, your data is being collected and, in most cases, being sold to "chosen partners for marketing purposes". Everyone's doing it because they can make money from it.

rosser 10y ago

Whether I'm paying for a service is orthogonal to what its ToS allows them to do with my data. When I'm not paying for it, you can be pretty confident the ToS explicitly allows it, with even money on its being phrased in abstrusely arcane legalese. They have to make money somehow...

goflyapig 10y ago

So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? No. A statement's truth doesn't imply its inverse [1]. It simply means if a company has employees, and they're receiving paychecks, and the money is not coming from you, then it's definitely coming from someone else. If you are giving them money, it doesn't mean they're not also getting money from somewhere else. But they're less likely to need to do that, especially if it would upset their paying customers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

mrlatinos 10y ago
This is implying that you're able to prove that all free products sell/profit from your data.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I think the idea is to help you think about the free services that you use and your privacy, not be a perfect way to describe every free service.