To be or not to be the product, doesn’t matter…
“If you’re not paying for a product, then you are the product” is a popular phrase used to describe how social platforms work, but it is mostly missing the point.
Let’s look at a regular business: Normally you’d have a business that offers a product or service to customers. The product or service is made by some kind of work, car makers build their parts with robotic arms and restaurants sell meals cooked by people. Both the automated car factory and the chef use work (in the abstract) to create their product. Generally the work is done by the workforce, the employees are paid by the boss, who owns the business. Now back to tech.
On social media we also have owners and workers, services and products, users and consumers, etcetera. So let’s apply the “you are the product” logic to Facebook. If you are Facebook’s product then Mark Zuckerberg would pay his employees to “get something from you” and then sell what they extracted from you to a customer. This is only partially true, first of all Facebook does indeed “get something out of you” and does sell it for profit. But the thing Facebook sells to their customers is not only manufactured by Facebook employees. On real life social media platforms the data bought and sold is not created by google and twitter engineers sitting on nice Philip Stark chairs drinking coffee. The data does not come from tech employees, but from a combination between employees and platform users.
For Facebook to get someones data, someone has to provide their information to Facebook. Of course you can’t just email Mark your data, so a platform infrastructure has to be set up by engineers and designers for people to easily submit their data. Both Facebook employees and Facebook users create the data being bought and sold for profit.
This subtle distinction between users being the product and partially making the product is enough to spark doubt to the “you are the product” mantra. Because users like you and me participate in the makings of “the product” that places users more comfortably in the definition of a producer.
According to the Merrian Webster dictionary, producers are those who produce, and produce is defined as “to make available” and to “bring about”. And this classification perfectly fits social media users. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter are valued at millions of dollars because they provide advertisers a crowded place to advertise. Social media users are valuable because of their age group, interests and other marketing reasons. Marketers are looking to increase their companies growth, therefore they have to push consumers to purchase their products and services.
The main takeaway here is that advocating for privacy is way more complex than it seems. And people should embrace complex ideas if they are really passionate about privacy or the internet. You can start out by saying “if you’re not paying for it you are the product” but soon or later other related topics come up like who’s paying for it, why are they paying for it, then we can dive into the psychology of interface design and persuasive tactics, marketing, economics, history and on and on and on. This is of course because all fields are not one dimensional and overlap with other domains. But especially when it comes to a topic that is perceived as a problem to be solved we should not opt for easy answers. If privacy is such a big deal as some advocates claim it is, then is switching from Facebook to an alternative social media platform enough? Will switching solve all the privacy concerns? and what are those nuanced concerns?
If you care about privacy but stop thinking about it after deleting Facebook then the issue might be solved for you. But most privacy invasions happen without our knowledge. You might be safe, but what about your friends and families? should you get them to switch? But what if your grandmother uploads pictures of a family gathering without you knowing? Then get her off Facebook too, but this will have to continue forever for you to guarantee data privacy. So Switching off Facebook will not solve this issue, not for you or for all of us. This domino effect is due to that very same complexity we discussed earlier. If we don’t work on the economics of tech, or it’s psychology or history then the overall problem of privacy will remain. This is why “you are the product” misses the point. Because it forgets about all the little details.
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you are a worker - and likely not getting paid.
Image used:
“World of Warcraft Addict Series 3/9” by vectorlyme, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.