
“You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product” - sohkamyung
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/
======
vinceguidry
What I really hate is when an entire industry segment colludes to force me to
change a preferred aspect of my lifestyle to something that's more lucrative
for them.

An example of this is the subscription economy article posted a few days ago.
Companies like Adobe decide to not sell licenses anymore, rather to rent
access monthly. Not that I use Adobe, but Feedly dinged me for $69 for their
Pro option again this year. Do I really need to pay yearly for a damned RSS
reader?

The other one is music. The music industry doesn't want to sell you perpetual
licenses for individual tracks or albums anymore. It's too hard to manage.
Apple managed to force them to do it, and Google got in under that umbrella,
but the music industry wants to move directly to subscription services rather
than build out a customer-friendly rights management regime for individual
tracks. I hate subscription music services with a bitter passion and
absolutely refuse to use them.

If the industry manages to wipe out individual track sales, I will pirate
music. I would hate to go back to those days, but it's preferable to not
having control over my music. It's already absurdly, ridiculously hard to move
music from one iPhone to another. To be told, 'no, you can't have this track
you fell in love with because it wasn't released yet on your stupid service',
is an even greater snub.

The music industry will have to pry my music library out of my cold dead
fingers.

~~~
cageface
More and more of my music listening and purchasing happens on Bandcamp. It's
pretty much exactly the model I want as a consumer and the music there is a
lot more interesting than what's going on on the major labels anyway.

~~~
KozmoNau7
Bandcamp is amazing. The terms are easy to understand, the pricing is fair,
the audio quality is guaranteed (they require uploads to be CD-quality
lossless foiles, as a minimum) and it's super easy for the musicians to manage
tagging and even physical merch sales.

It's exactly how music sales and distribution should be done.

~~~
krn1p4n1c
It also has some of the highest margins for the musician. I don't mind paying
$10-15 for an album if I know the majority of it gets back in their hands
rather than the distributor or label.

~~~
KozmoNau7
And you can choose to pay more than the recommended price, for artists you
particularly want to support. According to Bandcamp's statistics, a lot of
people actually do that.

------
seanwilson
I find this quote is always used in a really over the top way. I don't find
free services that show me ads I can easily ignore scary. People talk about
ads and recommendation systems like they're going to brainwash you into buying
things you never actually wanted as if you have zero critical thinking skills.

~~~
cooervo
If you think ads don't work in you it means they are doing a great job in
lying to you and deceiving. Ads and marketing are more subtle than you can
imagine.

Some example: * You don't need to change toothbrush every 6 months, that's BS.
Toothbrushes are plastic they are going to last hundreds of year more after we
are all dead. * You don't need to put so much toothpaste on your toothbrush,
it was Colgate ads that started showing people putting a fat and thick long
toothpaste on toothbrushes to encourage more use/consuming of toothpaste. *
The alkasetzer guys wanted to double sells, what did they do started showing
commercials of people throwing 2 tablets instead of one. * Also shampoo and
hairproducts, they started showing people putting a ton of shampoo in their
hands and making bubbles in their head. Actually you don't need that much
shampoo.

~~~
seanwilson
> If you think ads don't work in you it means they are doing a great job in
> lying to you and deceiving. Ads and marketing are more subtle than you can
> imagine.

I'm aware ads influence everyone in some form, I just don't think the
influence is so strong to me that it's going to make me do anything majorly
against my best interests.

> Some example: * You don't need to change toothbrush every 6 months, that's
> BS. Toothbrushes are plastic they are going to last hundreds of year more
> after we are all dead. * You don't need to put so much toothpaste on your
> toothbrush, it was Colgate ads that started showing people putting a fat and
> thick long toothpaste on toothbrushes to encourage more use/consuming of
> toothpaste. * The alkasetzer guys wanted to double sells, what did they do
> started showing commercials of people throwing 2 tablets instead of one. *
> Also shampoo and hairproducts, they started showing people putting a ton of
> shampoo in their hands and making bubbles in their head. Actually you don't
> need that much shampoo.

My issue with these examples are 1. these kinds of products are cheap and 2.
using a bit more than you need isn't likely to have negative impacts, so
therefore I'm not going to dedicate a lot of time into researching these
things. For expensive and important products (e.g. laptop, phone, mortgage,
anything to do with health) I'm going to treat ads as a very bias source and
look for more objective sources.

~~~
TeMPOraL
But that's exactly the trick. Stuff that people consider very expensive and
important (like laptops, homes, etc.) will always get scrutiny. Marketing
departments in those areas look for different solutions. But if some companies
can make everyone pay 2x for cheap things you use daily, that still is 2x the
profits for them (and a 2x expense for you, which you may not notice because
it's made from small amounts distributed over time).

~~~
seanwilson
> But that's exactly the trick. Stuff that people consider very expensive and
> important (like laptops, homes, etc.) will always get scrutiny. Marketing
> departments in those areas look for different solutions. But if some
> companies can make everyone pay 2x for cheap things you use daily, that
> still is 2x the profits for them (and a 2x expense for you, which you may
> not notice because it's made from small amounts distributed over time).

I really just don't feel it's a big deal and I tend to avoid big brands. It's
not time efficient to scrutinise every small purchase anyway when most of
those kinds of products are roughly the same. I'm not going to get tricked
into spending so much money on toothpaste, shampoo etc. that it will have an
negative impact on my life.

Yes, I understand ads influence, but I think people go really over the top
about it using terms like "brainwashing" and "unethical".

------
jzl
tl;dr version: There are versions of this quote going back to the 70's,
starting with one by artists Richard Serra & Carlota Fay Schoolman. But the
modern incarnation seems to have sprung from a comment on metafilter that
became popularized when Tim O'Reilly tweeted it out (with attribution) in
2010. Here's the tweet:

[https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/22823381903](https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/22823381903)

I thought it was interesting to see the history of this.

------
golemotron
"In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product
(readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers)."

― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
(1988)

------
rdtsc
> You are the product of TV.

Off topic of course, but there is a deeper double meaning there -- that your
your personality, preferences, hopes, dreams are shaped by the media you
consume. Things like what you think success is, what you think happiness is,
heroism, kindness, friendship etc many of those things were shaped by the
movies you saw, books your read, games you played.

It's common to hear that "you are what you eat". That's true at the physical
level of course. But this is also true that "you are the media you consume".

Now to the topic at hand. I think any totalitarian or brutal government regime
would salivate getting access to the data people freely and voluntarily share
with Google and Facebook. Imagine a combination of a Stalin's regime and
Facebook as a partnership. Or Google working with the Stasi. It's hyperbolic
to make that connection today, but with things like watching this happening:
[http://fortune.com/2017/05/24/mark-zuckerberg-disrupt-for-
pr...](http://fortune.com/2017/05/24/mark-zuckerberg-disrupt-for-president-
pac/) we are getting just a bit closer to it. People are wondering why a tech
guy like me doesn't have a Facebook account and that's one of the reasons.

~~~
Fnoord
> That's true at the physical level of course.

No, not really, this is way too simplified and is factually incorrect. Lets
take the example of a pig. If you eat a pig you don't become a pig. Certainly
not overnight.

Here's a more factually correct analogy which does explain what happens:

Whatever you throw in your stomach (engine) gets burned and becomes fuel. If
you regularly throw in too much fuel, the engine becomes overburdened and you
become overweight (+ other obesitas related diseases).

That's a rather subtle but significant difference.

> But this is also true that "you are the media you consume".

The same is true here. Its not a A -> B process; the process is much more
subtle, nuanced, and complex. E.g. here's also other aspects such as genes and
personality which meddle w/the process.

------
jozzz
Is this quote the difference between Google and Apple?

With Google, you are the product - you pay $ and have your data harvested and
used for advertising. With Apple, you are the customer - you pay $$$ for a
locked down, secure (they try?) system, that doesn't sell your data.

I grew up as an Apple hater (no particular reason), but now that privacy is
becoming more of a concern, it seems that the Apple ecosystem offers a better
product? Am I being naive about Apple?

~~~
fullstackhuman
I can't say that I pay anything to Google and I've used their products for
years. I haven't purchased anything through them directly, so it's unfair to
say "You pay Google and they harvest your data for the privilege." I'm aware
that they're providing a "free" service to me (Gmail, search engine etc) and
in return I "pay" in personal data.

------
simula67
You are not the product, your attention is the product. Companines like Google
are not engaged in human trafficking.

Similar problems can be seen in management : thinking of human beings as
resources. Human beings are not resources, their _time_ spent advancing the
company goals is

~~~
vog
Not sure what this nitpicking is good for.

For the moral argument, I don't think it makes a difference which part of a
human's mind is the product.

This is like saying: "He didn't run him over - only his legs!"

Or, less drastically: "The whole program isn't full of bugs, just the Foo,
Bar, Baz and Main functions."

~~~
simula67
The term 'You are the product' carries heavier connotation than 'just the
mind'.

Also in the case of Google it serves a brief span of your attention to
advertisers. They are not engaged in selling minds, wholesale or in part. I
have enabled Google Search ads on all my machines for this reason. This
distinction is worth making, since in some cases, it is an algorithmic
matching between buyers and sellers. This helps consumers discover products
and services they need and advertisers to discover demand they may otherwise
be unable to tap

------
EGreg
As a side note, people seem to think there is a corollary: if you're paying,
the company is no longer monetizing your data on the other side. Where is
proof of this corollary in the real world?

~~~
chii
There's no proof that a paying service isn't also selling your data on the
side. The only way to prevent a company from selling your data is to not give
'em any!

~~~
Practicality
Like those privacy policies you get from your credit card companies: "Do we
share your personal information with other companies? Yes. Is there anything
you can do about it? No."

I always laugh at these. At least they are telling me.

------
saimiam
Huge shoutout to The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu who invented the term "net
neutrality." He's also an engaging correspondent if you write to him.

I cannot recommend a better business book, bar none.

------
chris__butters
This can be twisted to companies like Google and Facebook, who collect so much
personal information about us as users and then sell that data to their
advertisers; we literally are products then.

~~~
vog
Wow, I didn't know that this quote is so old. I thought that it originated
with Google and Facebook in mind.

~~~
chris__butters
So did I especially after watching videos like Free is a lie by Aral Balkin
that takes this premise and attaches it to the big free tech companies.

------
bretthopper
I prefer "if you don't have a fork, you're on the menu"

------
j_s
_2007: “You are the product.”

2017: “You are the training data.”_

[https://twitter.com/chrisalbon/status/857609299731791872](https://twitter.com/chrisalbon/status/857609299731791872)
\- 27 Apr 2017

~~~
harryf
[http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/12/the-
free-...](http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/12/the-free-
model.html)

