Free apps are not free — what you actually pay with
What actually gets exchanged when a service costs nothing, why the profile outlives your account, and what changes if you run the tools yourself.
“If you are not paying, you are the product” is a good line and a slightly lazy one. It sounds cynical, and it stops the thought right where it gets interesting.
The more useful version is mechanical. Free services cost money to run. That money comes from advertising. Advertising pays more when it is well targeted. Targeting requires knowing things about you. So the service is built, from the ground up, to learn.
Not out of malice. That is simply what the machine is for.
What actually gets exchanged
Not your name and email — those are the boring part.
What accumulates is behaviour. What you opened and when. What you watched and how far through before you stopped. What you searched for, including the searches you thought better of. Roughly where you were. Which other things you use. Who else appears alongside you.
None of that is interesting in isolation. Assembled over years it becomes a model of you that is startlingly good at predicting what you will do next — and in many cases better than your own recollection, because it never forgets.
- 01 you use it at no charge, which is the part everyone notices
- 02 what you do is recorded opened, watched, searched, roughly where, and who else is nearby
- 03 a profile is built this is the part you never see and cannot check
- 04 attention is sold which pays for step 01
The profile outlives the account. Deleting the app removes your access to it. What was already inferred about you has usually been shared or sold onward, and it does not come back.
Three things people get wrong
“I have nothing to hide.” It is not about hiding. Nearly all of this is used for mundane commercial purposes. The problem is that you cannot see the profile, cannot check whether it is accurate, and cannot easily correct it — and it is increasingly used for decisions about you rather than just adverts at you.
“I can just delete my account.” Deleting the account removes your access. What was inferred about you has usually already been shared, aggregated or sold onward, and it does not come back.
“Adverts are the price and adverts are fine.” Adverts are the visible part. The collection is the actual price, and it continues whether or not you ever click anything.
The bit that is genuinely unfair
You cannot inspect the thing. You have no practical way to see what has been inferred, no way to check it is right, and no way to know who else holds a copy.
If a shop kept a written file on you, you would want to read it. Online, that file is the entire business model, and it is the one thing you are not shown.
Data protection law in the UK and Europe gives you a real right to ask for a copy, and it is worth exercising once — the answers are often surprising. But the process is slow, the responses are often near-unreadable, and hardly anybody does it twice.
What running things yourself changes
There is a self-hosted equivalent of almost everything in this category — photo libraries, file storage, notes, bookmarks, media, password vaults. Most of them are open-source projects that anybody can run, and a good number are genuinely excellent.
What changes when you run one is not that it is more private in a marketing sense. It is that there is no second party in the arrangement. Nothing is learning, because nothing has a commercial reason to. No profile exists because nobody has anything to sell.
That is a different kind of statement from a privacy policy. A policy describes what a company has decided to do and could decide differently. This describes what the system is capable of.
If you want a sense of what the categories look like in practice, the applications running here covers the common ones — photos, files, notes, bookmarks, passwords. All of them are projects you could run yourself.
Being fair about it
Free services are not a scam. Enormous amounts of genuinely useful software exist, available to everybody regardless of income, because advertising paid for it. That is a real public good and it should not be waved away.
And running your own has real costs: setup, maintenance, backups, and being the person who fixes it at an inconvenient time.
The point is not that free is bad. It is that free is not free, and knowing the price lets you decide where you are happy to pay it.
A map app that knows where you drove — most people are fine with that. A lifetime of family photographs held by a company that profiles their contents — quite a lot of people, once they think about it, are less fine with that.
You are allowed to draw that line in different places for different things. Most people have simply never been asked to draw it at all.