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You are not the customer, you are the product

There are a lot of free services on the internet.

When you use these services it's pretty fair to say that you expect to be paying for them somehow. The reality is that most of them are funded in some way or another by advertising.

With that in mind, you become "the product" and advertisers are the true customers of those "free" services. These companies are selling access to you (the product) to those advertisers (the customers) in return for a fist-full of cash.

That's how the likes of Google, YouTube, Stuff and a bunch more make their money.

I think most people have accepted this deal and are grudgingly happy with it.

However...

We are now entering an era where this paradigm is being applied to products and services that you have already bought and paid for.

We've seen this with a number of video streaming services such as Prime Video.

There was a time when you paid $8 a month to Amazon and in return you got access to a raft of series and movies without ads. It was a great deal.

In this arrangement, *you* were the customer and Amazon made all its money from the monthly subscriptions that people paid.

Sadly, greed never sleeps and the quest for ever-increasing profits year on year meant that Amazon decided to reshuffle the deck. They simply started adding advertisements to their product and turned the homepage into a sales pitch for other streaming services and video rentals.

To add insult to injury, they also hiked the subscription.

Now, if you subscribe to the base tier of Prime Video, you are no longer the customer, you have become the product.

However, the worst instance of the way you've become the product was disclosed this week when we learned that LG smartTV sets constantly spy on you. They spy, not only on the type of content you're watching but they also listen to what you're saying -- even when the TV itself is supposedly turned off and disconnected from the internet.

To make things even worse, these sets constantly scan any network they're connected to, creating a list of other connected devices which is constantly updated and sent back to LG's servers.

They're also constantly scanning for wifi access points and also sending that data back to home.

Gamers Nexus did an excellent (albeit way too long) video on this situation. It's well worth a watch:

So let's make it very clear. You buy an *expensive* LG Smart TV with your hard earned cash but you are still not a customer, you are a product. All the information collected about you, your watching habbits, the things you talk about whilst near the TV and a list of all your other connected devices is used to create a profile that makes you incredibly valuable to advertisers. LG then uses this information to deliver targeted ads to the scree you paid for and even things like your fridge, if you're stupid enough to have an LG smart fridge.

This is so invasive and disingenuous that it should be illegal and may well be so in some countries.

However, this is the new normal.

We've already seen that in the USA, car companies are selling data from customer's car computers to insurance companies so that they can adjust policy prices to perceived risk. Once again, you are not a customer, you are a product.

How do I deal with this?

I have a "dumb" TV with no internet connectivity that connects to an external device only over HDMI. My vehicle is a 1994 Toyota ute with no connectivity and very little in the way of onboard smarts. Rather than use a smartphone I stick with my $29 bar phone and its ability to only handle voice calls and SMS messaging. I use my own domain and mailserver for much of my email communications and I'm increasingly using Google-alternatives such as DucDuckGo for my searches.

This is not an absolute guarantee that I'm not becoming "the product" on occasion but it is minimising it as much as is practical in today's world.

By the way, I will *never* buy an LG product. I have had a few and they have all been absolutely awful. Add to that this latest spyware situation and they're off my list, as are Sony for their bait and switch with regards to "digital purchases".

Remember that the most power you have is your buying power as a consumer. Exercise it wisely.

Carpe Diem folks!

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