“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.
I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)
What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”
Still the thumbnail shows people at the beach instead of dry river banks or the handful of remaining wild animals dying in our burning forests…
This is the equivalent of illustrating an article about the “possible danger of smoking cigarettes “ in the 60/70s and illustrating it with a cool picture of James Dean having a smoke.