Modern software often times is presented as being “free” and thus accessible for everyone. This includes applications like Google, Instagram or Linkedin. All of those are used by millions of users every day and some of them depend on these platforms to pay their rent.
These platforms all have a reasonable use-case, however they fail to serve the transparency, that a company might need to provide such services in real life. For example; Google indexes, categorizes and searches the world wide web for it’s users. This is no easy task and only a few companies have even tried to do such a thing. Apple even refused the idea of developing their own search engine because it would be too expensive.
This means, that Google wouldn’t actually make any money if they did not use some dirty tricks against its userbase. Using Google is not actually free. They sell basically everything that you do and want to keep you as long online as possible to show you as many ads as possible with the goal of selling you something that you probably don’t even need.
Often times people are saying that; “I know that im the product but I’d rather be the product than to pay ten bucks for googling.” While I understand that it might seem weird to have to pay to google, imagine it in the real world. Imagine you go to your hometown’s library and you want to search for a book, that has information about how to cure a cold with natural plants. Because you don’t want to search through the massive library to find what you’re searching for, you just ask an employee. They stands up and starts walking and gesticulate that you should follow them. After arriving at some section of the library that you’ve never been to, he points to a book that has general instructions on how to cure a cold. It doesn’t explain how to do this with plants, but rather points to medicine like paracetamol. After some time, the employee tells you, that this actually is a book that is being promoted by the publisher. You put the book down and ask him to show the next book and tell them again; “Using natural plants”. They start walkingg again and you follow them to another section. They again point to a book and as you start putting your hand on it, they tell you; “Uhm sorry, actually if you want to read this book, you are required to send the publishers your history of the books that you’ve read for marketing purposes. Also to improve the readers experience, the publishers would like to record you flick through the book.
I think by this time, you probably would look at the employee and ask them if this is some sort of joke or if there is a hidden camera. This happens again on the next book that you want to read and the next. After the fourth try, you’ve had enough and you want to leave the library. On the way out, the employee asks you; “Are you sure that you want to leave just yet? I’ve analyzed you walking and conclude, that you’re probably going to have a baby with your wife in about three months. We also have a section on how to be a good parent if you’re interested.” This especially furiates you, because you actually do have a baby incomming with your wife.
At this point, it is likely, that you just leave, ignoring this person or maybe even call the police on them because you feel so scared. Well I can tell you, this is how it works in the online world.
Said library represents these big services that provide so called “free” services. The employee represents Google and the first book are the first few entries in the Google search results; Ads. The next books that try to record you while flick through are the first few entries in the search result, all of which have about a gazillion cookies that you need to accept, multiple tracking pixels and probably use something like Microsoft Clarity to analyze where you click, what you click and how long you wait between the clicks. The last incident, while trying to leave, should present how Google tracks everything that you do and shows you ads based on this. These ads are often times pretty accurate in a way that might even could be considered scary.
These companies treat you like the product because you are the product. You are nothing more than a pizza in a freezer in a really large mall. The real customers of these companies are the advertiser that try to make you buy their products. Most of the largest programs in the world are designed in such a way. Yes, you may not pay with money, but you pay with your data, your time and your sanity.
In contrast, there are applications that you need to pay for, where you are not the product but rather the customer. The companies that develop such software often times are really transparent about how much money they make and how it is being spent. They don’t need to bombard you with ads and cookies are actually only used for session management (so you are still logged in after closing your browser). In my opinion, I’d rather pay for even a simple (but really complex and expensive) service like googling if I then can trust such an essential service more than to pay with some hidden fee.
If you’re still not convinced by this, keep in mind, that these companies have no interest in serving you the things that you actually need to learn, feel better or be productive. They only show you one side of the coin and that is the side where you use their service as extensively as possible. Because of this, individuality is endangered. You don’t find information that is written from a person, that has had the same problem as you, but rather read information that was written from a person with the intention to also keep you as long as possible on their service.
The conclusion of this writing should be, that you should read through privacy policies and for essential programs, that you use to be productive, you probably should find an alternative that doesn’t have a free tier because if there is a free tier that has almost every feature, there is probably a pretty hefty fee hidden somewhere. Not all paid software is free from this and I just can only repeat again; Read the privacy policy! Even if you don’t understand everything or even if you just see how large it is, it can give you a sense of how much things are happening behind the scenes. For example, a privacy policy of about a thousand lines is probably better than one with half a million lines. This takes about a minute and gives a pretty quick overview. Also, try to find a support email for the service. Bad services make it very hard for users to get help. Often times they have to talk to some chat-bot for several minutes to maybe get an email. This also can be a good indicator to see if the service is trustworthy.
A bonus tips for iphone users; Alltough Apple isn’t really an angel itself on the topic of harvesting user data, they make it pretty easy to get a easy overview of a privacy policy of an app. For this, open the App Store and go to the page of the application. If you scroll down a bit, there is the App Privacy section, which provides a quick overview of what is used to track you. If an application has a “Data Not Collected” or only few entries, it is probably a good choice.
As for the awnser to “Why paying for software is essential”: If the developers don’t get money from you, they get it from somewhere else and you probably do not like where this money is comming from.
NOTE: The provided solutions should not be seen as a fixed way of solving the problem. Products can have short but horrible privacy policies and apps from the app store can have few entries but still do many shenanigans with those. This are just some of the solutions, that I found, that work for me and I hope that some might work for you.