If you are not buying the product, YOU are the product!

 

Do we need to pay to use Instagram? Do we need to pay to use Twitter?  NO! So, do you believe that these people are offering you their services for free? NO! They are manipulating your opinions, emotions, ideas, and much more!  A person decides to stay happy, but now his feed won’t let him stay happy just because he consumed some sad content in the past. The FOMO that you get after watching the posts of your friends, or not even friends, just some random influencer, traveling to different places distracts you from your own goals and makes you feel like leaving everything and going to some place like Ladakh! Why? Just to post a transition reel? Won’t you call this manipulation? The influencers, under the name of fact-checking, make your opinions biased. They make you believe who is wrong and who is right according to their personal views. What about your views? Why should we listen to them blindly?          

You are being used and sold as a product to someone else if the good or service you are using doesn't cost you anything and nevertheless generates enormous profits every year. Why do I need to provide permissions to every app I download for access to my call logs, contacts, images, microphone, camera, and other data? This is a question that many of us may encounter sporadically. Every minute and every second, each of these rights is stealing your data away from you. Your personal information and data are being sold. Why does a collage-making app want access to my call logs? There's no reason... However, this application costs you nothing (monetary) in exchange for a few MBs of your internet, which, in our opinion, is not too much. Financially speaking, a 2GB per day data pack for Rs. 299 a month is not much for you because you can use it for so many activities! With just one click, they can access tons of confidential data against a few MBs of your internet, which does cost a lot! What do they do with this data? You might be wondering now... BUSINESS! When you and your friends are discussing a particular shoe brand, an advertisement for that brand suddenly pops up on your screen. We know that your devices are listening to you. It’s not the device, actually; it’s the app. Whether it be Amazon, Flipkart, Instagram, or Facebook, the advertisements will be instantly updated to the thing that you want. You might have noticed such ads, right? Because yes, for the app, you are the product.

Many teenagers are caught on the web of free WiFi. At many parks or public places, there are very few instances where it is being provided by the government. But we don’t usually check who those free Wi-Fi providers are; we just jump in. Then it asks us to sign in for the network. Here it goes! your mobile number! That free wifi is never free. The messages that we receive from apps like Rummy Circle, etc. to join those fantasy games are this cage, because the teenagers who are hungry for such free wifi are the market for these games. If in some places the free wifi does not ask you for the sign-in, it will have a different market. When it is provided in a public place, you will be sitting there for hours. Then comes the hawkers and different food vendors asking you to get some unhealthy, junk food, and we do eat those things many times because we do not have an idea of how much time we are sitting at the place. It is helpful for the poor street vendors, as these free Wi-Fi areas are giving them customers, but we are spending our money for no reason, which is also costing our health. Thus, the free wifi would cost you something else, if not the network. These indirect costs of such services are not visible to that chunk of the population.

Moving to the important aspect of time... When we say the apps are free, they definitely cost you your time, which is indeed not free. You might have done something productive in those 2 hours of playing pubg or scrolling reels, which are of no benefit to your personality growth. Consuming content on YouTube or Instagram depends on the kind of material it has. Studies show that scrolling reels and YouTube shorts have reduced the patience of viewers. There is a decrease in the number of people who watch videos for 20–25 minutes at one stretch. When we compare watching shorts for 2 hours with watching long videos, it gives you more pleasure and satisfaction to consume more different kinds of content rather than staying in the same genre. But it decreases your ability to listen to someone continuously, and people start feeling monotonous. As a result, the watch time is reducing day by day for good, useful, and advantageous content. Here, not just your time but also your intellectual capabilities are becoming the product.

When you search on Google for things good about eating rice, it will instantly give you the answer, which would indeed be convincing you to eat rice, and then if you open your Jio Mart, it will give you an 80% discount on some XYZ brand of rice! What do you think? Is that discount just today’s thing? And you found it by luck. No, you are mistaken. There are thousands of discounts on many products daily; it’s the app that is doing the process of searching for the discounted product for you based on your search history. If we look at the same case in reverse and search for the disadvantages of eating rice, the search engine would still give you many reasons, equally convincing you to not eat rice. Wow, what a paradox! Whatever you want, it will answer you the same way. In short, search engines are reading your mind and providing you with fodder that you will like. It is playing with your mental health. When it comes to mental health, when someone downloads an exercise app and prefers to lose weight, the internet will force them to buy protein shakes, diet products, different fat-reducing creams, and whatnot. At a point, it will make you think that yes, I am really fat and I need these things to become thin! The worst things are the images that they portray of a before-and-after scenario. A normal person can be easily manipulated by those images. How easily they are affecting your mental health is just dreadful!!