“If you’re not paying, you’re the product” is a good line, but a slightly lazy one. It sounds cynical, and it stops just where things get interesting.
The more useful version is about how it works. Free services cost money to run. That money comes from advertising. Adverts earn more when they reach the right people. Reaching the right people means knowing things about you. So the service is built, from the start, to learn about you. There’s no malice in it. That’s simply what it’s built to do.
What actually gets exchanged
It isn’t your name and email. Those are the boring part.
What builds up is behaviour. What you opened and when. What you watched, and how far in you got before you stopped. What you searched for, including the searches you changed your mind about. Roughly where you were. Which other apps you use. Who else shows up alongside you.
None of that matters much on its own. Put together over years, it becomes a picture of you that is very good at guessing what you’ll do next. Often it’s better than your own memory, because it never forgets.
- 01you use itat no charge, which is the part everyone notices
- 02what you do is recordedwhat you opened, watched and searched, roughly where you were, and who else is nearby
- 03a profile is builtthis is the part you never see and cannot check
- 04your attention is soldto advertisers, which pays for step 01
The profile outlives the account. Deleting the app removes your access to it. What was already worked out about you has usually been shared or sold on, and it does not come back.
Three things people get wrong
“I’ve nothing to hide.” This isn’t about hiding. Almost all of it is used for everyday selling. The problem is that you can’t see the profile, can’t check it’s right, and can’t easily correct it. And more and more, it’s used to make decisions about you, not just to show you adverts.
“I can just delete my account.” Deleting the account removes your access. What was worked out about you has usually been shared, combined with other data or sold on already, and it doesn’t come back.
“Adverts are the price, and adverts are fine.” Adverts are the part you see. The data collection is the real price, and it carries on whether or not you ever click anything.
The unfair part
You can’t look at the profile. You have no practical way to see what’s been worked out about you, check it’s right, or know who else has a copy.
If a shop kept a written file on you, you’d want to read it. Online, that file is the whole business, and it’s the one thing you’re never shown.
Data protection law in the UK and Europe gives you a real right to ask for a copy. It’s worth doing once, because the answers often surprise people. But it’s slow, the replies are often very hard to read, and hardly anyone does it twice.
What running things yourself changes
Almost everything in this list has a version you can run yourself (“self-hosted”): photo libraries, file storage, notes, bookmarks, media, password vaults. Most are open-source projects, free for anyone to run, and many are excellent.
When you run one yourself, the change isn’t that it’s “more private” in the advertising sense. It’s that there’s no second company involved. Nothing is learning about you, because nothing has a business reason to. No profile exists, because nobody has anything to sell.
That’s a different kind of promise from a privacy policy. A policy says what a company has decided to do, and it could decide differently. This is about what the system can do at all.
If you want to see what these look like in practice, the applications we run covers the common ones: photos, files, notes, bookmarks, passwords. All of them are projects you could run yourself.
In fairness to free
Free services aren’t a scam. A huge amount of useful software exists, open to everyone whatever their income, because advertising paid for it. That’s a real public good and shouldn’t be brushed aside.
And running your own has real costs: setting it up, looking after it, backups, and being the person who fixes it at a bad moment.
Free isn’t bad. It just has a price, and knowing the price lets you decide where you’re happy to pay it.
A map app that knows where you drove? Most people are fine with that. A lifetime of family photos held by a company that analyses what’s in them? Quite a lot of people, once they think about it, are less fine with that.
You’re allowed to draw that line in different places for different things. Most people have never been asked to draw it at all.