Who does not enjoy free products? Free is good, we all love free products. Until a decade or so before, I don’t remember that there were this much free stuffs available, except some free tester food bites in the mall / grocery stores, or up-sale teaser products!

Now it appears that lot of technology is free! Kim Komando, a syndicated columnist for USA TO DAY, has list of free technological products, including the followings:

• Online Storage: Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive, Drop Box and others.
• Office Software: LibreOffice, Google Doc and others.
• Photo Editing: GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), Photoshop Express, Canva, and others.
• Distraction-free Writing Tools: FocusWriter, Calmly Writer and many others.
• 3D Design Software: SketchUp Make, Easy Home styler.
• Writing Tools: Grammarly, Hemmingway editor.
• Video Editor: Liteworks
• Disposable e-mail: Malinator or Maildrop.
• Internet Firewall: TinyWall, ZoneAlarm.

For more detail: 15 tech upgrades you can get for free by Kim Komando | USA TODAY

Why so much Products are free?

The big tech companies create very expensive products and provide free services to billions of people around the world, who happily use them. How can they afford to offer such expensive products free? Its because these companies monitor user behavior and sale the user data to advertisers in very high price. Security expert Bruce Schneier quoted as saying “surveillance is the business model of the internet”.

As the Guardian tech reporter John Naughton writes that anything that is labelled as “smart” , “personalized”, “digital assistant” is the supply-chain of personal data to the product owner.

Surveillance capitalism

In a Washington Post op ed article ‘Surveillance capitalism’ has gone rogue. We must curb its excesses, Harvard Business School Prof Shoshana Zuboff writes that lot of big tech companies are taking advantage of users’ ignorance to harvest their personal data, without permission) and turn into big profits.

In a new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, author Shoshana Zubof says that “surveillance capitalism undermines autonomy — and democracy”.

Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.

Shoshana Zubof, Professor at Harvard Business School from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Time to Become Informed Users

We are addicted to these free tech products, now even though we realize that they are bad but still we cannot avoid using them. We have to start learning to be digitally-informed user and making informed choices to own our data.

Content of this Notes was inspired by High tech is watching you from The Harvard Business Gazette & James Bridle‘s book review in The Guardian. Cover photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash