Is Anything Really Free?
Data is currency
As a person that loves to learn, I am always on the lookout for research information related to an interesting topic. These topics tend to fall into the court of the environment, minimalism, or remote work. When they are released there is usually a landing page, telling me all the catchy, high-level learnings. I get intrigued and want to read more. Then comes the all too common call to action – “Get for free”. I fill in my name, email, and specific data points. The email arrives and I get what I sought out. But what happened in that free transaction? Because there was a transaction, if you noticed it or not.
There’s an old saying – “nothing in life is free”, and with few exceptions, I have seen that as true. In the example above I did pay for that research. I provided them my data. They now have my name, email, and specific data that they can use for various reasons. This data is usually – company, role, company size, etc. This allows them to target you, via email and other ways. The goal of the targeting is to turn you into a paying customer of the service or product that they make. This is an obvious “free” transaction, but there are a lot that are not so obvious.
You might not remember, but during the 90s and early 2000s we used to pay for email. Yes, a monthly or yearly cost for email – the thing most people hate more than brussel sprouts (which I love). Now, consumer grade email is free. The most popular email service in the world is Gmail and they provide you really great email for no cost. But c’mon, is it? You are paying with your information.
Google’s key service is that they index the internet. They do this by collecting, organizing, and presenting information. The only way a business can do this well is with data and a lot of it. Google scans all of your emails for words, links, common contacts, etc, and uses this to build features and even advertising targeting. They allow you to save 15gb of email, documents, and photos to your account so they can index that information. If you ever want to see what activity they are tracking, see this link. If you are ever interested in how they secure it and keep it safe, see this.
We all know about cookies, they are on every website. This is the most common way companies track your data. Thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it must now be transparent to us. Sure it is annoying to click the accept or x button, but the transaction is visible. But if data is currency, what are cookies? These are artifacts that hold your state on the web. In utility, cookies can hold your cart while you are buying something online. Cookies can keep you logged into a website. Cookies even allow for auto-saving on websites. But more commonly, they are used to track your presence across the web. They allow for the collection of your information, for advertising targeting. Cookies are the reason why your Google search haunts you for weeks, across all of your devices. They are the reason why digital advertising is so successful.
In the modern world, data is currency.
In the modern world, data is currency. Due to this, businesses are glad to offer you something for free. But is the sale of your data always bad? No, it’s not. There are companies trying to be ethical about your data. A great example of this is Fathom. They are an analytics platform that puts the person first. Most of the major companies have done a lot to become more ethical too. They are allowing for you to opt-out of a lot of the more invasive data collection methods. But that isn’t quite enough, as these should be the default.
If you want to use a service without paying with your information, you will likely have to pay with cash or find a way to disable most of the data collected. You likely cannot disable it all, but being able to disable the data that identifies you specifically is key. Data that is anonymized is the best form of data collection. It is less accurate, so most companies do not do this by default, but it will give the person the best of both worlds in most cases.
A few solutions that I have for common data collection points are:
Use a Google Voice number when asked to provide a cell phone number
Use a browser that defaults to not sharing data when possible
When you decide to get that next free app or ebook, think about the cost. Is it worth the trade off? Is there a way to limit what they collect? Maybe you can just pay for it with currency. Data collection will not always stop me from downloading my next report, but I will be using an alias email.