Redefining online community Part 7: Seriously, most free apps aren’t really free.

April 2022
Author Cal Loo is a serial social entrepreneur, the founder and executive director of a nonprofit company, a self-professed techie at heart, a 30-year tech consultant, and an ordained ceremonialist. He has been blogging about living more intentionally and navigating major life transitions since 2015. In this seventh piece in a ten-part series Cal explores hidden costs of “free” app.  In future posts he’ll address online security, online safety, and freedom of speech/information. He’ll close this series by introducing the Eos Community Connections Portal – an online community connections portal unlike any of the others.

 “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”People have been throwing around this popular adage since the 1930s, basically saying that nothing is ever really free. Sometimes, you’ll just hear the acronyms TNSTAAFL, TINSTAAFL, and TANSTAAFL. It’s hard to say who actually originated it, but free-market economist, nobel laureate and author Milton Friedman popularized it with his book There’s No Such Thing As a Free Lunch. In the context of this blog, TNSTAAFL suggests that things that appear to be free will always have some hidden or implicit cost to someone, even if it is not the individual receiving the benefit.

In the software industry, we also say: “If you aren’t paying for a product, you are the product.” All-for-profit companies sell something, and their underlying objective is normally to make as much money as they can doing so. Whoever is paying for that something is the real customer. When it comes to social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram, and most search engines like Google or Bing, the platform owners make a ton of money somewhere, and it isn’t always obvious how they’re doing it. If you are using a service you don't pay for, it's because they may be selling the data  they collect about you while you’re using their product, or selling ad space to sponsors that take advantage of the fact that the platform has your attention. Facebook, for example, has spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy defending their data usage and management practices. In the end, it’s become very clear that they’re engaging in business practices of which many users are unaware and may not approve. The 2020 primetime Emmy Awards winning film The Social Dilemma takes you pretty deep down this rabbit hole and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do.  I just watched it again and honestly, it was a big reason why I recently completely deleted all of my personal social media accounts.

What’s the real price of free apps?
For the purpose of this post, I’ll boil it down to three words: privacy, data, and ads. 

Most people have used Google to search the internet at some time, and probably have never wondered why they don’t have to pay anything to use it.  In this June 2021 Bloomberg article, authors Nico Grant, Mark Bergen, and Naomi Nix report how the US Department of Justice were accelerating their probe into Google’s digital ad market practices, and this isn’t the first time Google’s been in trouble over this. This 2012 BBC article  describes how Google had at that time “started to operate under a new privacy policy that enables the Internet giant to dig even deeper into the lives of more than one billion users,” claiming that “the changes make it easier for consumers to understand how it collects personal information, while allowing it to provide more helpful and compelling services.” Most of America’s state attorney generals disagreed, along with a leading regulator in France, believing “that Google is stepping too much on our right to privacy in its continuous mission to sell more advertising.”  
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In the case of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook had harvested the personal data of 87 million users, which Cambridge Analytica then used  to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
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Wondering what else these companies might be doing with your personal data?  In his September 2021 article in the Markup, author Alfred Ng writes “Even though companies like Facebook and Google aren’t directly selling your data, they are using it for targeted advertising, which creates plenty of opportunities for advertisers to pay and get your personal information in return. The simplest way is through an ad that links to a website with its own trackers embedded, which can gather information on visitors including their IP address and their device IDs.“  Companies pay Facebook and Google massive amounts of money to be able to more effectively market their products to you while you’re using their platforms.

In his 2012 article in Forbes, Scott Goodson closes with “... in this digital age we have sacrificed our privacy in order to access all manner of free stuff on the web. It’s a movement that most of us have come to accept. Or have we?  I’ll borrow a quote I read on MetaFilter recently: ‘If you’re not paying for it; you are the product.’ I’m not sure how many people are fully aware of this sentiment yet or whether they even care. But the next time you’re browsing the web or enjoying a video on YouTube, remember that Google is watching your every move; because that’s the price you pay.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

​Getting to the root of the issue.
In a word, it comes down to capitalism. For-profit companies are exactly that - they’re out for profit, and to make as much money as they can from your use of their software platforms. Beyond government regulators trying to rein these companies in, I see two really good alternatives for people like us to get off this profit-crazy train: 1.) stop using their products, which is easier said than done, and 2.) find alternative platforms from companies that are transparently coming at this from a whole new perspective. Why would a non-profit company create and offer an alternative platform and forego the billions of dollars that could be made harvesting your data? Simple. To make the online community a better, healthier, and safer place.

When we started designing the Eos Community Connections Portal three years ago we decided to base it on the concept that everyone should be able to use it for free to find the resources they need and feel like part of an authentic community during challenging times. When we say free, we mean it - our privacy policy ensures that users’ personal data will never be sold and that we won’t sell aggregated user data; and we also won’t allow advertising in Eos. Developing a platform as complex and elegant as Eos and then delivering it to the world hasn’t been easy or inexpensive, and it’ll also take significant resources to manage it and develop future versions, so we’re going to offer inexpensive annual memberships in which users can post their own content on the platform and also access additional powerful features by paying a small and fair annual membership fee. Everyone will be able to use Eos for free, but if you want to post content, you’ll need to create an account and sign our user agreement. We’re on a mission to prove that authentic, healthy, and supportive online community is possible without greedily taking advantage of its members, and we believe that fair and transparent membership fees should be the actual cost of using the primary features of the platform. Eos is the Greek goddess of the dawn, and the initial release of Eos will usher in the dawn of a new kind of online community. 

​Coming up next: Key concept: online communities and freedom of information.