[greatzebu]

There's a sense in which this is true, but it's a really facile argument that doesn't get to the heart of the relationship between Google and the people who use it. "You're the product" implies that they're just using you, man, and that if people were more sophisticated they wouldn't put up with this treatment.

In practice I find that the most sophisticated internet users are among the heaviest users of Google products, which implies that the value proposition that Google provides is good even if you understand how their business works. The product doesn't generally extract value from the producer when it's sold to the consumer, but I get an enormous amount of value from using Google.