There's a saying that predates the internet, but is often used to describe the omnipresent and free internet services like Facebook we use on a daily basis: "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product."
This criticism has been frequently marched out in the fallout of Facebook's recent Cambridge Analyticia scandal, during which it was revealed that more than 87 million user profiles were improperly shared by academic Aleksandr Kogan to a political consulting firm that helped Donald Trump.
Now, Facebook is taking major strides to fight back against the tsunami of criticism it's facing over user privacy. In a blog post published Monday, the company tried to address the idea that it's exploiting users for the purposes of mining data. The post says, in part:
If I’m not paying for Facebook, am I the product?
No. Our product is social media – the ability to connect with the people that matter to you, wherever they are in the world. It’s the same with a free search engine, website or newspaper. The core product is reading the news or finding information – and the ads exist to fund that experience.
This extremely direct response to critics didn't go over well — at least not with journalists. Many believe Facebook comparing itself to a newspaper is particularly rich, because the company has long been criticized for hurting the newspaper industry, and also because Mark Zuckerberg has long claimed that the social network is "not a media company."
So, as to whether Facebook users are actually customers or the product, it depends on how you look at it. The notion that they're the product is actually pretty simple to understand: Free online services usually make money by extracting lots of data from users, then selling that data to clients for targeted advertising. In this sense, advertisers are the clients, and the people enjoying the free content are what's being sold.
You could, of course, believe that Facebook's core product is "reading the news or finding information," as the company states in its new blog post. But that certainly sounds a lot like a media company!
Either way, one thing is certainly clear: Facebook as a service is really hard to define, even for its most senior executives.
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