If it’s free, you are the product. Are you giving it away for free?

I love this TED video. Although it pushes for what the email privacy could look like in the future; it highlights the free point. If you are not buying/paying for the service, you are the product. These free services may not cost you in $$, but there is a value exchange. You get a free service, the provider gets data insight into your interests, and in turn creates/sells targeted advertising based on your data. Innocent – probably. Greedy – definitely.

TED video: Andy Yen: Think your email’s private? Think again

After all email services are still businesses that need to make money to keep the lights on.

The most valuable thing about providing an email service is the analytics data that it has access too. Your email provides (Google, Yahoo, etc) with a vast amount of information about you. Not only do they have the ability to capture your profile information, but your browsing information too. Email has the added benefit of providing information about the people you contact. In other words, gmail learns a lot about non-gmail users by scanning emails sent to & from gmail users. This effectively helps target advertisements to everybody. 

Many privacy “agreements’ are yes/no — you’re either in or out — and especially online, it’s not reasonable to expect people to decline them (since use of basic services is often at stake).

If you needed someone else’s thoughts, here is Wikipedia explaining the use of ‘You As A Product’.