You can make gmail "dumber" by using the IMAP api and then encrypt your email? Unless you use google apps for work since you aren't paying for the service you are the product.
Using IMAP + encryption obviates all of the features that keep me on gmail, and would also be time consuming (especially with my non-technical contacts). On a practical level, I think your suggestion is equivalent to using a different email service -- high effort of implementation, loss of gmail's "smart" features, etc. Whether I'm using Google's servers or not, hiding my stuff from their systems amounts to the same effects on my life.
Google does not sell "users", that's why it is inaccurate and misleading.
What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road. "You're not the user, you're the product?" Would you say the highway owner is selling the personal information of the drivers?
The people buying billboards do not receive any personal identifying information about the drivers, they are instead buying access through an auction, like if this particular highway feeds into a sporting arena, then it is likely a good place to put ads for football fashion.
Within Google, Gmail/Inbox are Products. Their success metrics are user happiness and usage statistics. Like many startups, Google produces products which get marketshare and please users first, and then figure out the business model later. Google itself was launched with no real business model. And when Gmail was created, there was probably no plan on how to make money on it. They just wanted to do something awesome, and Gmail was born.
> What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road.
If it's funded primarily by the billboards and not by the drivers, then yes, the billboard purchasers are the real customers. And that could potentially lead to poor results, such as optimizing for billboard viewing time rather than safety and throughput.
Even if I accept your interpretation, it still doesn't justify the description "you're not the user, you're the product" In the case of the private highway example, even if the customers are the advertisers, the product being sold isn't the drivers, it's the billboard space.
Google's users are not its products. You might claim its users are not its customers (users != customers), but that does not imply the users ARE the products. Just like the New York Times readers are not the real business customers, the advertisers are, however no one has ever exclaimed "The New York Times Readers are the Products!"
The Product is the New York Times, because that is the thing _Being Produced_. It is the work product of the journalists.
Likewise, the work product of the engineers, SREs, PMs, managers, ops and support for Gmail is the Gmail Service. That is what is created out of the hours they put in. There is an ancillary product that leverages externalities produced those products (virtual real estate to auction off), but it is not people's data as the product being sold.
This meme is really tiresome because it doesn't get to the root of the matter, which is, are the incentives of those working on Google's products aligned with the incentives of the business operations which have to derive a return on those investments.
There are two ways to look at this depending on your level of cynicism:
1. Google is a smart company that looks at the long term and realizes value by the creation of positive externalities. That is, it works from the premise that if you make good products that please your users, you will retain and get more of them, and there will be opportunities to monetize that. That is, retaining users is paramount, ergo, user trust, branding, and generally not pissing off users is very important.
2. Google is a short sighted company that looks at what is currently has, lets bean counters manipulate its products purely to increase the bottom line by maximizing the amount of stuff they can sell. This means, they only consider the wishes of advertisers, and act to increase purely the amount of ads that can be shown, regardless of how much it annoys users.
Now, you can decide to believe #2 or #1 depending on how harshly you view the trajectory of Google products over the years. To be sure, they have done things that have annoyed users. But I believe, based on evidence of actually working here, that the primary impetus of engineers and product managers who guard the high level product features, that the focus is tipped towards user concerns.
No, the product being sold is viewers and viewing times.
Which means the highway owner will try to make sure that everyone has to use this highway for their commute, no others, and then the owner will try to make sure people drive slower, so they see more ads.
And I can tell you, Google is definitely #2. Many examples in the past showed that. Like them directly ignoring a law, and then arguing in court "but throwing away all the data we got when we violated that law would mean we’d have to collect it legally, and that would cost millions!" (Compare: Google vs. Federal Republic of Germany: Street View)
Then it would be fair to complain if the company was a) new, or b) it was already a typical thing to do for them. Google keeps proving otherwise; applying "you're the product" meme to them is nonsense.
Perhaps so, if the company was short-sighted. A company thinking for a longer time-frame would likely weight customer happiness as a very important factor for long-term profits.
The product is the service being offered, in the case of Google it's search, mail, maps, etc. How they make money is unrelated to what the "product" is. E.g. I switched from free ad-supported YouTube to the paid ad-less YouTube Red, does that mean what the "product" is suddenly changed? Also you really are the "customer" or "user" of the many services being offered by Google just like an advertiser is a "customer" of the advertising side of Google. That doesn't imply one type of customer (the advertiser) is more important than another type of customer (the user).
The entire point of the "if you're not paying, you're the product" spiel is that everybody already knows everything you said, but there's a fundamental difference between paying and not paying. You're not going to get that far demanding that people stop thinking there's a difference, nor are people going to stop verbalizing that difference, nor should they. What's cliche on HN is something the vast majority of the rest of the world still has not heard, and in this case, ought to.
The reason this argument is so useless it that it is so non-specific. A useful form would be "This company is treating me poorly in way X because they have an incentive to do so." Instead, X is never specified, just implied via FUD.
Companies only interested in short-term profits might be willing to strip mine their users and treat them poorly. Companies that are interested in the long term have an incentive to treat their users well, i.e. as if they were paying customers.
That was a rational argument. You know as well as I do that if you explained it the way I did above most people would not care. But instead you insist on the "you're the product" FUD nonsense to elicit an emotional response. Spreading FUD is a demagogue's job, I would never condone it.
The point is that it's a plainly obvious rational argument that is the ground state of the discussion, not some brilliant insight that once it is revealed to people they're sure to see it your way.
And it's not FUD to point out where money flows really come from. In fact I find myself wondering why you are so passionate about people not talking about it? It's not an invalid observation, a lie, or something irrelevant, so people aren't going to stop talking about it. Generally jumping up and down and shouting "Stop following the money!" is, well, not how conversations on HN go, shall we say? If you're searching for something to be contrarian about I can provide a few better candidates....
you insist on the "you're the product" FUD nonsense
I like the phrase as it draw attention to the fact that the services offered aren't "free" but rather are paid via a mechanism that a typical user wouldn't think about. Sure it is shocking, but it is useful.
I'm not sure how it is FUD ... your data is being repackaged and sold off to the highest bidder. There's no doubt in that.
Spreading FUD is a demagogue's job, I would never condone it.
A more accurate statement would be that you are the supplier of several key inputs (both data and ad viewership), that are used in creating the product that they sell to customers paying money, and that, as a supplier, you are paid with the products you consume (e.g., gmail, etc.)
Another (equivalent) accurate way is that you are, in fact, a paying customer for the product you are consuming, but a customer that pays in-kind with things that they use to create another product that they sell to people who pay with money.
He's not wrong and you are. You are not "the product", and saying such is so divorced from the truth to be nothing more than a lie at this point. "You" are not being sold, access to you is.
Look at some ads, get some great web services. Seems a fair tradeoff.
I'm not entirely sure this is a semantic argument worth wading into, but I think there's a wrinkle worth addressing in the "you're the product" mentality. In order for Google to effectively serve you ads (and convince advertisers it's worth their prices), they accumulate vast amounts of information about their users. From some perspective one's identity is largely based on or equivalent to one's purchases, tastes, interests, friendships, knowledge, etc. Advertisers (like Google) try to know as many of these as possible about everyone they can, and I can see how for many people this is equivalent to Google selling "you" -- they have a digital representation of your identity, and their ability to comprehend it is the real service that sits behind the advertising.
I disagree that this is an argument over semantics seeing as how "Google is selling access to your attention based on what they know about you" is much less scary sounding (and more accurate) than "Google is selling you/your information".
The latter makes it sound (willfully) as if random third parties have access to the information Google has collected, which is a pretty blatant falsehood. Anyone is able to go sign up for an Adwords account and see how "targeting" works. At no point does the advertiser get to see anything about the people.
The whole "Google is selling you/You're the product" meme is a breathless, thought terminating cliche that needs to die.