The product....

The product....is you.

People that know me know that I started saying this when the web was young, and it has never been more true than it is today.

I am speaking to the users of free web services - services like Facebook, Google Plus, and to a lesser extent blogger, gmail, MSN, and any of thousands of others for which there is no user paying revenue model. (yes, this includes me).

One thing users of these services need to understand...you are not the customer. You are the product. You, your content, your relationships, and your surfing habits, your history, your purchases, your discussions....this is the stuff that millionaires are made of. This should not be big news for many of my readers, but what we often fail to ask ourselves is, what is the real cost of being the product?

Lets look at some generalizations that apply, in varying degrees, to some popular "free" web services

Value propositions:

• Utility - email sure beats sending a letter, and checking your wall is an easy way to check up on what your friends have been doing.
• Entertainment - Who doesn't like to play a game now and then?

The price:

The privacy cost, personal -

•  You can expect that someone, somewhere, has access to a profile of most of the sites you visit, for how long, and what you do while you are there. This data will be used for marketing, then aggregated, warehoused, and sold. Security research shows that although your data may have been "anonomized", it is a trivial exercise, given a large block of data, to personally identify users, even out of multiple users on a single computer. Given a month of "anonomized" web history data from most household PC's, I can likely easily extrapolate how many users, their names, their approximate ages and sex, their home address, their individual preferences in a variety of things, their political views, their social status, their work habits, and often much, much more. I can say that from personal experience that with "anonymized" web history alone, I could make a pretty good play at blackmail with a significant fraction of users. As anyone who has done tech work on home computers can attest, TMI is a regular work hazard. 
• Banks, insurance companies, employers, and law enforcement organizations have been keen to harness the power of this new information source. It is now a common policy to review social networking content prior to approving loans, paying out claims, underwriting patients, and hiring new employees. 
• Harnessing this trend are a new breed of surveillance aggregators that build personal profiles in advance (kind of like a social credit score) identifying health, risk, market, or and behavior data, attaching that data to a personal profile that includes tax and other public records, and proactively selling this information to marketers, employers, investigators, insurers, and lenders. Yes, it is on your permanent record. No, it doesn't matter if it was deleted, it has been cached. All your base are belong to us.

The privacy cost, public-

• Do we value our privacy? The bar for privacy is ever pushed downward by the normalization of total disclosure. The problem with this is that when any of us does this, it pushes the bar down for everyone - sort of like littering, a personal action that has public consequences. 
• Trivializing privacy normalizes pervasive surveillance. Is this really what we want for our future?

Opportunity cost, private-

• We are all painfully aware that each of the 365 days of the year carries 24 precious hours. Of those, about 10 are needed for rest, hygiene, and eating. You may work or go to school for 8 hours - add the commute, and that leaves maybe 5 hours a day for discretionary activities. A recent study of social networking users shows that 95% of social network users who logged in at least once a day used the site for 1 or more hours, with nearly 20% using the site for more than 4 hours a day. What type of value was generated for these users? What else could they have been doing in the social, personal, or educational realm that might have yielded more tangible results? What is the social "payback" of chats and wall posts Vs. a cup of coffee with a friend, or a even a well thought out email?

Opportunity cost, public-

• While the enhanced networking facility of computer facilitated social networking certainly makes connections in the world of commerce and governance easier and more transparent, what are the costs to society of this type of connection versus traditional friendships? It certainly is possible to maintain a brood of internet buddies, while failing to establish any real friendships. 
• Friendships are an important part of our social fabric, literally the glue that forms a cohesive society. These social contracts, especially the implied, unwritten ones, are what makes the world a basically friendly place. 
• What is the collective cost, as a society, of investing our emotional currency in ethereal,  relationships, event though it may be  with people we really know? If it weren't for social networking, would we chose to spend that much time writing to distant friends and relatives? Shouldn't we rather be visiting, talking to, or sharing activities with nearby, real-world friends and neighbors, who provide us with our real world support network? 

Please think this over, and leave any relevant comments or feedback below....