What bothers me is that this phrase becomes a thought-terminating cliche.
Too often, it's used to shut down all conversations around corporate malfeasance re:privacy, so the industry doesn't get better, we all just move on to the next big story. And victims are blamed and shamed. "Your fault for using a free service, what did you expect?" vs. "This is unacceptable behavior, let's force a change."
Not to mention so many don't understand free vs. non-free. Are there ads? Are there optional purchases that keep the company going? As someone else mentioned here, unroll.me showed ads, which would lead users to believe their usage was being subsidized by those ads - and Slice's About page on its web site says nothing about using unroll.me as a data source, it claims to use its own shopping app.
That's all well and good - and many people realise and accept this - but the degree to which you're the product can clearly vary wildly. That's the real issue.
Of course it varies. It's up to you to decide/deduce/infer what the "cost" of using a free service likely is. Understanding that there IS a cost is really the first step, one which a good portion of the population seems to not understand.
To be fair Unroll.me shows you ads in their emails to you so a user may think thats how they monetise and be ok with that. Its another thing altogether when the company sells all of your email data directly to buyers.
We come for startup and tech news. YC is a startup and tech funding company that needs to have it's portfolio reach us as their customers/employees/investors/etc...
