There is a saying in tech that if the product is free, then you are the product. That is, the information that systems like Apple, Facebook, and Google gather about their users is the backbone of their business model.
Now, as ever greater amounts of data about our likes and dislikes is swept up by artificial intelligence, nearly everything there is to know about tech consumers is increasingly being repurposed by these companies to grow their bottom lines. The list of surveillance services masquerading as benign social tools is long and everywhere.
A first step we can take toward greater digital privacy is to pay attention to which entities profit from taking it away from us. These come with tradeoffs; the tech giants did not become dominant by offering unappealing products.
When Gmail first came on the scene there was some discussion of how it would scrape the communications by users to build profiles that could be sold to advertisers. Google Search works in the same basic way, watching everything we are interested in and then following us around the internet, often beckoning our attention with creepily relevant ads. Google Docs, the popular, free word-processing platform, knows everything we type. Google Drive and Google Photos scan everything we upload. YouTube, also a Google product, knows everything we watch.
Facebook’s related products include WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Threads. Each collects data on users and aggregates them. Even our computers are part of the surveillance ecosystem; Apple, Windows, and Google Android operating systems by default collect data about our interactions and how we use their platforms. Microsoft, for example, discloses, “As part of our efforts to improve and develop our products, we may use your data to develop and train our AI models.” You can be sure that the other companies are doing the same thing. It is not a comforting feeling to realize that what we do on our computers and devices is helping teach what are in effect robotic brains to be better, smarter, and more efficient.
Untangling our reliance on many of them is daunting, but there are alternatives out there. Nothing is for free. The more we know about the world we live in, the better we can manage what the world knows about us.