No free lunches online, but plenty of threats to privacy
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Milton Friedman said it in the 70s and my slightly skeptical and generally accurate Italian father has told me that for at least as long. Friedman can have the credit for the saying, but Dad gets credit for the applying.
Since the beginning of the Internet, we have been told that we are getting free stuff (songs, articles, videos, entertainment, gigabytes of storage, social connections, etc.). In reality, we have just been paying with a different currency-our private information. Think about it, you have given Facebook your birthdate, hometown, current town, religion, sexual preference, marital status and a daily update of what you like, what you do and who you know. As Javier David points out in a piece for CNBC in a piece about online privacy, we, as consumers, have become slaves to what we were told was free, but in reality comes with massive payments in a very personal and powerful currency.
