[Karunamon]

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.

[dikaiosune]

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.

[Karunamon]

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.