Free Internet is illusory. Indeed, you know the drill: if it’s free for you, someone is making money thanks to you. And if you’re wondering how much your addiction to Facebook, Instagram and X is worth, know that it’s in the four figures every year. If not more.
Are Quebec Internet users the biggest naive people on the planet? They are stolen for absolutely nothing and without even complaining about their personal data by foreign companies, which make billions of dollars in profits every year thanks to them.
How much is the data that you provide completely free to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X and YouTube worth? If you spend 30 minutes a day on either of these platforms, that data is worth at least $1,000 a year. This is what the German firm HeyData calculated in 2021, which helps European companies comply with laws governing respect for private life.
Facebook and Instagram earn on average just over 3 cents for every minute you spend in their environment. Unsurprisingly, these companies do everything to ensure that these minutes turn into minutes, then hours.
And it works.
Real theft
To save a handful of dollars, thousands of Quebecers have flocked since last spring to Chinese discount sales applications, such as Temu and Shein. Do they even know what the few dollars they save really cost them?
In a rather harsh report against Pinduoduo, the Chinese company that owns Temu, Chinese short seller Grizzly Research calculated earlier this month that Temu lost $40 for every trade a North American buyer made on his site. How can an online shopping company justify losing so much on every transaction?
Grizzly Research believes that Temu collects enough personal data about its users to resell it for a profit to third parties, companies whose name and nature are unknown. Some of this data, even Apple and Google do not want applications to recover. This includes the contents of your address book as well as your phone and web browsing history.
Fun fact: Temu and Shein are not authorized in China. The Chinese government would undoubtedly not like competition from its companies in a sector in which it excels: tracking its population.
Meanwhile, a majority of Quebec Internet users are reluctant to pay to consult their local media: a Léger survey last week revealed that two out of three Canadians are of the opinion that information is a product that should be easily accessible to everyone. and free of charge.
We have known since the days of Napster that Internet users of all backgrounds prefer to participate in illegal acts – as the large-scale and unauthorized distribution of content protected by copyright has always been – rather than pay what they acquire on the Internet.
Note that the media, whether they rely on a subscription model or an advertising model to make money, do not require you to consult your address book and then bombard your contacts with spam and suspicious text messages…
Does privacy have a price?
The key to the success of Facebook, Google and TikTok is convincing their users that their privacy has no value. Or in any case, that this value does not belong to the public, but to companies who know how to “monetize” it. They then convinced the vast majority of people that what they consumed through these networks had even less value than their private lives.
The truth is that the data produced by anyone who browses the Internet or owns a smartphone is worth a small fortune. For example, 113 of the US$116 billion in revenue Meta generated in its 2022 fiscal year is advertising revenue. This is the amount collected by Meta on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp thanks to their users’ data.
This data comes from sources that go well beyond their website or mobile app. They include browsing history on other websites, different places visited with a wireless device in your pocket, and similar data collected on loved ones and contacts.
Former Google boss Eric Schmidt has already said it: privacy no longer exists. What he meant is that, for a majority of Internet users, this private life does not matter. So why, today, do even governments hope to raise billions of dollars by selling to companies access to digital data compiled in health and education from patients and students?
Meanwhile, patients and students who are looking for better service are spending thousands of dollars visiting… private facilities.
Truly, nothing is free in life.