[nutshell89]

I know a lot of HN readers are probably of the mind already that, "when a product is free, you are the product", and "these companies use zero marginal cost to create economies of scale".

The article hints to much worse impacts than that — with massive data harvesting and collection, companies can effectively monopolize knowledge, create information asymmetry advantages, allowing customers (e.g., data brokers) to charge consumers the maximum that they are able to pay, directly increasing prices.