I don't really like that quote. Many services you do pay for still treat you like an asset to make money off. And many services that are free, like the internet archive for example, are not.

I'd put it this way... if you're paying a company, you might still also be the product, but if you're not paying for something that a company is spending money to make, you're definitely the product.

I service people for free because I can afford it despite I'm a company. It's part of the philosophy of sharing value for free. There are many services and products I use for free and I then make a donation to them because I love what they do. So clearly it's not true, maybe just true for the companies that do not care much about doing something good for people with only optional contribution in return.

Agree.

Also, plently of people at Google, Meta, etc feel they are doing good by providing free ads based services.

I suspect people with low income are way better off with free search, free maps, free docs than if each was $3 a month. It doesn't sound like much but their were definitely times in my life where $3 a month per service felt like too much. And yet, those services arguably provide extraordinary value for their users.

Again, not true. There's many services like the internet archive that do not operate to make a profit. Lots of open source also fits this bill. The absolutism of the quote is just overly cynical. On the other hand, if the company is VC funded I would say this is generally true but it also dismisses basically all of non-commercial open source. How are you the product when you use debian?

I think social data tracking and categorization reached a point of saturation leading to diminishing returns. As a result, data companies that relied on this to target advertising audience are rolling us premium SaaS plans to de-risk their revenue streams from this problem.

Are you looking for windows?

In some cases you pay and you're still the product. I paid for a subscription for an online news subscription and they are still showing me some ads (the economist) - likely sharing my data too.

Are you looking for windows?