Customer or the Product?

   The idea has been talked about before here, here and here.


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   There are many free services out there.  Don't get me wrong... many are quite useful and I use many myself.  But people get upset when there is an outage (like this).  And more than one social network has had issues over changes in privacy policy (I'll talk more about this in a future posting).

   But we must remember that we are not the customer but the product.  Think about what information you are handing over to that free service.  They may say one thing in their privacy policy now, but change it in the future.  They may go out of business or get bought, and the privacy policy under which you first posted may no longer apply.  And help your kids make good choices when posting to online networks.

   What do you think?  What free online services do you use?  Have you had situations in which your online information was used in an unexpected way?