of course they are...are you paying for your gmail?
If not, then you ARE the product; you don't think they are providing you free email out of the goodness of their hearts do you?
If not, then you ARE the product; you don't think they are providing you free email out of the goodness of their hearts do you?
I see this repeated a lot and the reasoning doesn't hold up. You aren't the product - your data is a commodity. And there's plenty of free stuff online for which your data isn't a commodity (e.g. Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan Academy, so much of the free and open source software). So saying something like "if it's free, you're the product" is just lazy and demonstrably false.
I think if you are using a service/site run by a for-profit company, then it's probably fair to assume that they are making money off you somehow.
Users are more like the soil of the product. Google is the farmer harvesting data that grows from it and profits from it.
Our new tragedy of the commons.