In summary: if you use its free software, it will be selling your data.ĭata-flogging is an important income stream for many companies, but most of them do their best not to tell us about it, either by mumbling vague, corporate platitudes about our privacy being at the cornerstone of their business, or by burying the relevant information on page 39 of the terms and conditions.
As the now familiar warning goes: if something is free, YOU are the product – and that was highlighted this week in a bold announcement by Czech anti-virus company AVG. Thousands of services claim to be free, but surreptitiously accumulate knowledge of our online gambling habit or our love of Delft pottery and somehow sell that information to third parties. As we humans wend our weary way towards extinction, we're becoming increasingly suspicious of the word 'free' and the internet has played an important role in escalating our cynicism. This week I was introduced to the word 'Tanstaafl', which may sound like a new, bottle-conditioned Trappist beer but is actually an acronym for 'there ain't no such thing as a free lunch'.
