You've proven that it should be changed to "If something free is Google's, you are the product".
Free things I'm benefiting from right now (right as I write this): Hacker News, Firefox, Linux, a keyboard a friend gifted me, a video of a guy talking about the color brown, the electricity paid by my landlord. I also just took out the trash which will be picked up, for free, by the city.
I'm the "product" of none of these things. They are paid for, indirectly, just as pretty much everything is. Just as for example, your volunteering time is paid for by your other actions in life allowing you to give this time away.
So what we should maybe change it to is closer to: "If something is free, it's just fucking free and there can be a host of reasons as to why so stop thinking in soundbites and employ critical thinking instead of being cynical about everything."
Open source projects like Firefox and Linux are sort of counter-examples, except they're backed by nonprofits. If a nonprofit is giving something away, there's actually a decent chance that they don't have surreptitious motives. Same for a friend giving you something, that's not really a "product" in the sense of the saying.
I'd say that HN actually falls into the category of productizing its users. The reason HN exists is to attract talent to Y Combinator, and to get an audience for the companies they fund. It's a productive relationship that has created a great forum, but HN doesn't just exist for goodness' sake.
A better phrase might be, "If you are the product then who is the customer?"
We really don't, since it's been beautifully illustrated through Google's actions over the years.
My favorite example is Google bragging to it's advertising customers that they were buying a copy of everyone's credit card transaction data, which could be used for ad targeting.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...