How free is "free"? - Via rare pattern:

TANSTAAFL

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

The idea behind this is that there's always some sort of exchange happening, even if it's not in cash. If I buy you lunch, I'm getting something out of it -- the pleasure of your company, a chance to boast or commiserate, an opportunity to share a new restaurant discovery, freedom from an otherwise mundane meal, relief from a spiritual debt acquired when you bought me lunch last week, whatever.

And yet when I buy you lunch, it does not imply that you now are entitled to inspect my purse, or peruse the messages in my iPhone, or rummage through my dresser. Those things are considered private to most of us, right?

Chris Anderson's entire perception of the "free" present and future seems to depend upon the assumption that not only our time and attention have no value, but that our privacy has no value ... that is, no value to us.

Those things certainly have value to the companies offering the "free" services.

Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. Just in case that wasn't totally clear, that's "unlimited" as in "infinite." So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero....

That's zero in cash. But just because you aren't forking over cash doesn't mean something is really free. With 'free' email, it may not cost you cash, what are you handing over otherwise? It may seem trivial enough, but you are paying for that mail in terms of having advertising rolled in front of your eyes, and in terms of handing over personally identifiable information that can then be leveraged, quantified and sold to others or leveraged in other ways.

[...]

Obviously your privacy, your time and your attention have value -- big money value.

"Hang on a minute!" you say. "I like watching YouTube, so what's the big deal?"

Perhaps that's the real point: It's not a big deal. The price you pay may be small most of the time -- small to the point of practically nothing. It's not a big deal, it's a little deal. And with millions of subscribers and bazillions of views, those little deals do add up to beaucoup bucks.

So can we at least admit that "free" is not really free, even if it is really really cheap most of the time?

(Read Original Article - Via rare pattern.)