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"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming servi

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.

Workaccount2 11mo ago
They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost with ads.
- malfist 11mo ago
  When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads
  - 9rx 11mo ago
    They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
    - noir_lord 11mo ago
      This is the most HN of HN takes. Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future. The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
      - 9rx 11mo ago
        > the price for the product at that time Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.
        noir_lord 11mo ago
        So by your standards, it's totally fine for Lenovo to use the laptop you bought from them to mine crypto a year after you bought it from them because the necessary hardware to enable that (it having a GPU) was installed at the time. I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.
        9rx 11mo ago
        Much like the F-150, if the license agreement between you and Lenovo allow Lenovo to do so, yes. I mean, if you didn't want that, you wouldn't have agreed to it, right? You are allowed to say no.
        noir_lord 11mo ago
        Ah... so we find ourselves at > “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” >“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
        9rx 11mo ago
        If a contractual party is not acting in good faith, there is a legal system to address that. But I know you will say that the legal system doesn't act in good faith, so... I guess you're screwed. Such is the pitfall of living under a dictatorship.
    - seeingnature 11mo ago
      Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can change the product at any time and you're always free to stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to no idea about future progress because that would limit sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there isn't anyone to respond with the truth. If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
      - 9rx 11mo ago
        > that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product. It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads. The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime. Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.
      - strogonoff 11mo ago
        I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was literally expected to ask about the future. However, one could be expected to ask oneself “what could such a low price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?” It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow. The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.
    - DonHopkins 11mo ago
      > You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates Who exactly was I supposed to ask that? The check out cashier at the store? The CTO of the company that manufactures it? Who even knows the answer to that question, and how are millions of consumers supposed to find that out and contact them directly, and why are they permitted to reveal proprietary plans if they even know? Your arguments are delusionally detached from reality.
      - 9rx 11mo ago
        > The check out cashier at the store? Normally F-150s, and fridges for that matter, are sold not by cashiers, but salesmen. I suppose there isn't any meaningful difference in the end — except, unlike a cashier, salesmen are named as such because there is greater expectation of them being intimately familiar with the product so that they can answer such questions. If they can't, that's a pretty big red flag. Why would you conduct business with someone who has proven to be shady (or at least incompetent)?
        DonHopkins 11mo ago
        I'd rather not buy a refrigerator that a salesman has been intimately familiar with.
    - lostapathy 11mo ago
      Who exactly would you ever ask to find out that the samsung fridge you were looking at was going to get ads in the future? Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.
      - 9rx 11mo ago
        They do know their own plans, though, and thus can offer a contractual guarantee on how the product they are selling will be treated in the future. If they aren't willing to stand buy what they are selling, why would you want to buy it from them in the first place? That's what we call a scam.
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    The norm is reduced costs because there are ads. The same Samsung also sells deeply discounted TVs that are ridden with ads. Netflix, amazon prime, Hulu, and youtube offer ad-subsidized subscriptions.
- pacifika 11mo ago
  It’s just moving the goal posts though, ars technica was reporting on a 3400 dollars for a Samsung fridge with ads.
- the_snooze 11mo ago
  There's really no difference. If a company must subsidize costs with ad revenue, it clearly shows that they don't want paying customers to be the sole judges of the product's value proposition.
strogonoff 11mo ago
First, in any case, the right solution is to make this business model (treating your users as a product, whether by offering free service or heavily discounted/subsidised product) simply illegal. It violates the way market is supposed to work and exploits information asymmetry—regulation against which there is plenty of precedent of. This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I don’t think it’s like you say at least in case of social media. If social media was paid only (like any actual product or service intended to benefit the customer) and users were choosing between paying different amounts rather than paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users, and to that end would start implementing features users want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad impressions). The interest of a service provider is aligned with the interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it is when the user is not the customer that it becomes a natural course of things. It is still possible to “double-dip”[1], but the difference between users being customers and users not being customers is that in the former you can be an honest service provider and sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the user. [0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram’s GUI is carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll position)? [1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars, IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from, compared to social media where interoperability is pretty much solved with open standards. [2] What is a paid-only streaming service that “dips” into advertisement in some unethical way?
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
  When someone opens with “there oughta, be a law”… they’re almost always shouldn’t be. No. You’re not going to regulate out human behavior or scammers or MBA’s looking for every avenue to maximize profit. Make a better system.
  - strogonoff 11mo ago
mikkupikku 11mo ago
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." Technically, it doesn't logically follow that paying means you aren't the product.
- strogonoff 11mo ago
  However, it makes network effect based de-facto monopolies hell of a lot more difficult!

Workaccount2 11mo ago

They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost with ads.

malfist 11mo ago
When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads
- 9rx 11mo ago
  They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
  - noir_lord 11mo ago
    This is the most HN of HN takes. Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future. The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      > the price for the product at that time Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.
      - noir_lord 11mo ago
        So by your standards, it's totally fine for Lenovo to use the laptop you bought from them to mine crypto a year after you bought it from them because the necessary hardware to enable that (it having a GPU) was installed at the time. I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.
        9rx 11mo ago
        Much like the F-150, if the license agreement between you and Lenovo allow Lenovo to do so, yes. I mean, if you didn't want that, you wouldn't have agreed to it, right? You are allowed to say no.
        noir_lord 11mo ago
        Ah... so we find ourselves at > “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” >“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
        9rx 11mo ago
        If a contractual party is not acting in good faith, there is a legal system to address that. But I know you will say that the legal system doesn't act in good faith, so... I guess you're screwed. Such is the pitfall of living under a dictatorship.
  - seeingnature 11mo ago
    Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can change the product at any time and you're always free to stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to no idea about future progress because that would limit sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there isn't anyone to respond with the truth. If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      > that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product. It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads. The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime. Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.
    - strogonoff 11mo ago
      I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was literally expected to ask about the future. However, one could be expected to ask oneself “what could such a low price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?” It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow. The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.
  - DonHopkins 11mo ago
    > You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates Who exactly was I supposed to ask that? The check out cashier at the store? The CTO of the company that manufactures it? Who even knows the answer to that question, and how are millions of consumers supposed to find that out and contact them directly, and why are they permitted to reveal proprietary plans if they even know? Your arguments are delusionally detached from reality.
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      > The check out cashier at the store? Normally F-150s, and fridges for that matter, are sold not by cashiers, but salesmen. I suppose there isn't any meaningful difference in the end — except, unlike a cashier, salesmen are named as such because there is greater expectation of them being intimately familiar with the product so that they can answer such questions. If they can't, that's a pretty big red flag. Why would you conduct business with someone who has proven to be shady (or at least incompetent)?
      - DonHopkins 11mo ago
        I'd rather not buy a refrigerator that a salesman has been intimately familiar with.
  - lostapathy 11mo ago
    Who exactly would you ever ask to find out that the samsung fridge you were looking at was going to get ads in the future? Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      They do know their own plans, though, and thus can offer a contractual guarantee on how the product they are selling will be treated in the future. If they aren't willing to stand buy what they are selling, why would you want to buy it from them in the first place? That's what we call a scam.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  The norm is reduced costs because there are ads. The same Samsung also sells deeply discounted TVs that are ridden with ads. Netflix, amazon prime, Hulu, and youtube offer ad-subsidized subscriptions.
pacifika 11mo ago
It’s just moving the goal posts though, ars technica was reporting on a 3400 dollars for a Samsung fridge with ads.
the_snooze 11mo ago
There's really no difference. If a company must subsidize costs with ad revenue, it clearly shows that they don't want paying customers to be the sole judges of the product's value proposition.

strogonoff 11mo ago

First, in any case, the right solution is to make this business model (treating your users as a product, whether by offering free service or heavily discounted/subsidised product) simply illegal. It violates the way market is supposed to work and exploits information asymmetry—regulation against which there is plenty of precedent of. This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I don’t think it’s like you say at least in case of social media. If social media was paid only (like any actual product or service intended to benefit the customer) and users were choosing between paying different amounts rather than paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users, and to that end would start implementing features users want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad impressions). The interest of a service provider is aligned with the interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it is when the user is not the customer that it becomes a natural course of things. It is still possible to “double-dip”[1], but the difference between users being customers and users not being customers is that in the former you can be an honest service provider and sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the user. [0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram’s GUI is carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll position)? [1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars, IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from, compared to social media where interoperability is pretty much solved with open standards. [2] What is a paid-only streaming service that “dips” into advertisement in some unethical way?

SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
When someone opens with “there oughta, be a law”… they’re almost always shouldn’t be. No. You’re not going to regulate out human behavior or scammers or MBA’s looking for every avenue to maximize profit. Make a better system.
- strogonoff 11mo ago

mikkupikku 11mo ago

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." Technically, it doesn't logically follow that paying means you aren't the product.

strogonoff 11mo ago
However, it makes network effect based de-facto monopolies hell of a lot more difficult!