It's difficult to argue against "free". The originally open spirit of the internet has been corrupted by companies who offer their services for "free", while in

It's difficult to argue against "free". The originally open spirit of the internet has been corrupted by companies who offer their services for "free", while in actuality it's done in exchange for the gold mine that is user data. Even if this is clarified, it's buried in the fine legalese of the T&S. And even if people read it, most will choose to make this exchange because they're already used to things being "free" online, because of the value of the service, and because it's never clarified how much their data is actually worth. The reality is that user data is exchanged in perpetuity on the data broker market, and the value extracted from it far exceeds the value of the service itself. Even paid services will harvest user data just because the profits from selling it exceed what they can realistically charge customers. All companies using this model should be paying users to use their service instead. This is an insidious and downright evil business model, fueled primarily by advertising.