The local fire departments sometimes give away free smoke detectors to households who can't afford them. That helps the homeowners, and it prevents needless fires to which the fire departments must respond, so it is a win-win for everyone.
Most of the time, however, when something is offered for "FREE" there is a catch of some sort. That is the source of the old saying, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Β Sometimes the "catch" is nothing big, but sometimes it is more invasive than people think.
re-drawn artwork by me from source
Among the things that come to mind are all the "free" games available nowadays. There are games such as "Farmville," and others, on Facebook, as well as tons of "free" games for mobile phones. Some of them, such as "CandyCrushSaga" and "Best Fiends" are even advertising on television Β β at a cost of hundreds or thousands of dollars per spot (or even millions, during really big events), depending on the time-of-day, the network, the projected size of the audience, and so forth. Β How can they let you play for "free" and still make money from the extensive development of the app and the subsequent advertising for it? By harvesting your data and selling it!
Many of these "free" games (and other apps, too) are keeping track of where users go (based on the GPS location of your phone), harvesting contacts to find out who you know, reading data from your phone (which may include birthdates, texts, etc.) and then selling all this data to "data brokers" for tons of money.
Once they have harvested your contacts, then they can start building a data-profile for all of the people you know, too, so then you are putting your contacts at risk for data harvesting as wellΒ β yet, your poor grandma and Uncle BillyBob will never know how they became targeted by telephone scams and such. Google probably knows more about all of us than the NSA ever dreams of knowing. I've heard people here on the blockchain speak ill of the NSA and their spying practices, but will speak that ill using Google Chrome's browser, knowing full-well that Google is a bigger spy than the NSA.
Sometimes we make concessions to get things at a discount, or for free. A good case- in-point are the supermarkets that have "customer loyalty programs." We fill-out a little card, then get a tag with a barcode on it for our keychain, which the cashier scans each time we shop. A recent foray to the market with my "loyalty card" allowed me to purchase a 2-pound (0.9 kg) can of coffee for USD $6 instead of the usual $8 priceΒ β a 25% savings on that one item! Β In exchange for that, my loyalty registration has allowed the store to track that "a 60-something-year-old female who lives near here likes savings on coffee and buys 2-pounds at a time."Β Big whoop-de-doo... it was worth it to save the money, in my estimation.
And... I don't like having 25 loyalty cards cluttering my wallet, so I have downloaded an app called StoCard for my smartphone and have scanned all my loyalty-cards into it, so they are quick-and-easy to access in the one app. In exchange, I have granted permission for StoCard to see the photos on my phone (which is necessary for scanning the barcodes, but if they see my barn & flower photos, too, who cares?!?!?).
So, there is always a trade-off, but if we carefully make our decisions, we can make it a win-win for everyone. We can make the decisions carefully by:
- not downloading every "free" app that comes our way
- only downloading apps from reputable companies & developers
- reading reviews of the app and its developer prior to downloading the app
- carefully reviewing the "permissions" requested before downloading an app and aborting the installation when those permissions do not make sense
- opting for "open source" projects from reputable entities over big-business operations
Trust me: The "Facebook Messenger" app does not exist just because Facebook truly wants to make it easy for you to communicate. Neither does Whatsap ...or Telegram ...or Google Chrome ...or CandyCrush ...or BestFiends. ...or most of the other big players in the biz. Like the pigs in the cartoonΒ β is your barn free? Is your food free? Ever wonder why it is free...??? Think about it...
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20-Jun-2019
Return from Are You the Customer? to πππ₯π₯πͺ's Web3 Blog
