Yes, the Sparrow acquisition is a great illustration of how the whole "you're the product" cult was broken from the start. No matter how much you are (or aren'

Yes, the Sparrow acquisition is a great illustration of how the whole "you're the product" cult was broken from the start. No matter how much you are (or aren't) paying you are always both the customer and the product. Even Apple, who gets plenty of money from their customers directly, is willing to pimp out their customers as "400 million active credit cards" in the right context. At the other extreme, Google devotes an immense amount of effort to continuously improving search. They know that they live and die based on how happy you are as a search customer, even though they aren't paid even a nickel from searches directly. I'll say it again: we're always both the customer and the product. There's no escaping that. Our only option is to decide which vendors' tradeoffs we are and aren't willing to live with. And black-and-white moralizing about whether or not "you're the product" gets in the way of picking the shades of gray that work for you.