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.
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.