"if you're not paying for the product, you are the product"

one of the greatest lies of our time

first of all, it must be noted that people will typically say this about social media but these services are not the only things that can do this, any kind of software can. this statement pretty much just claims that the price of a product, in this case software, is a metric for determining if said software has any malicious features, namely spyware, which turns the user into the product (the method of making money) at their expense, as their privacy is violated. the statement is partially true, there is loads of software that you dont have to pay for that have surveillance features, such as the google chrome web browser, discord messaging service, the windows operating system (few features are missing without a license key) and apple's itunes, to name a few. this seems to make sense at first but ultimately this is a narrow way of thinking. it turns out that paying software developers does not wash away any malicious intent or greed, after selling software there is still more money to be made by exploiting the user, turning the user into the used

if the statement's rule were to be followed, the user would fall victim to paid software like the adobe suite, microsoft office and ironically antimalware software like mcaffe, all of which collect data on its users, which means the users are the product as well as the software, despite the monetary cost. paying for software can also lead to more surveillance as software will usually encourage users to use identifying methods of payment like credit cards or paypal. to make things worse the user will be missing out on loads of software with no surveillance features that dont cost any money such as the icecat web browser, xmpp messaging protocol and vlc media player

a lot of people want a quick and easily solution to the problem of malicious software but its unfortunately not that simple

so then what is the solution?

you may have noticed i have been avoiding the word "free" to describe software you dont have to pay for. thats because in the 1980s Richard Matthew Stallman (known by his initials "rms") started using the word free to describe software that respects the freedom of its users. free software is software that can be ran, modified and distributed by any user (this is what this article refers to when talking about 'free' software). these conditions make it very difficult for malware such as surveillance to exist as users can identify these problems by viewing the program's source code, modify it to no longer contain them and distribute the modified copies to everyone. my point is: the only way to tell if youre the product is to look at the code (or talk to someone trustworthy who has), this can only be done with free software, which also gives users the necessary power to remove malicious features

rms had known this for all this time so in 1984 he began development of a free operating system called gnu which was completed with the addition of the linux kernel, developed Linus Torvalds, making a complete gnu/linux operating system in 1992. this is one of the greatest accomplishments of our lifetime, creating a free implementation of one of the most significant pieces of software we use, an operating system, giving us control over our computing. users must look towards free software if they dont want to be a product, regardless of how much money it costs. it turns out most free software doesnt cost any money however, as its difficult to monetize the distribution of software that everyone is free to distribute. it goes to show that there really are genuinely good people out there like rms who are willing to do whats right. if a user doesnt want to be a product they can find free software here and there are various guides on the web on how to install gnu/linux