The service is free
As you read these lines, an employee will open an artificial intelligence application to summarize a lengthy work memo, a mother will upload a medical report for her infant to understand test results that the doctor did not explain adequately, and a small business owner will upload financial statements to identify areas of waste. We may dedicate articles to discussing the validity of these practices, their pros and cons, but what concerns us today is that none of them paid a single penny for these consultations. Were they truly free? The answer is that the service has a price, but it is paid entirely by a third party, usually the advertiser, not the user. The numbers state this plainly: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced that advertising revenue exceeded 75% of its total revenues in 2024. Meta closed last year with revenues nearing $201 billion, of which approximately $196 billion came from advertising alone. In fact, what we consider common knowledge is not a secret; Meta discloses in its audited reports that the average revenue generated per user reached about $17 per quarter. This amount may seem trivial, but when multiplied by 3.6 billion daily users, it becomes one of the largest economies in the world! Attention is cheap individually, but expensive collectively. Here, we must avoid the common simplification that companies “sell our data.” While this is often true, value does not require selling to a third party; it is sufficient for the platform to know what we search for and what we linger on. Today, artificial intelligence has raised the bar, so to speak. Previously, platforms knew what we did, where we clicked, where we stopped, and how many minutes we watched. Now, we tell the tool what we want and why we want it. This has extended to even more sensitive and dangerous matters, as some individuals have uploaded sensitive personal or corporate data to these platforms and tools. This is not speculation: according to reports from Cybereason, the proportion of sensitive data provided by employees to AI tools rose to about 35% in 2025, up from approximately 11% two years ago. The shock comes when the platform informs you that you agreed, which in our view and that of many others is more of a formal consent than a genuine one. A study by two Carnegie Mellon University researchers, now considered outdated, found that if an average user were to read the privacy policy of every website they visited in one year, it would take approximately 244 hours to read texts written to be passed rather than understood. None of this means we should abandon free services. Much of it saves us time and money and genuinely boosts our productivity, and paying is not a certificate of privacy excellence. What is required of us is not to give the service more than it needs to serve us. If a tool is for editing an image, why does it ask for your contacts? If a website is for reading news, why does it want your precise geographic location? If it is an intelligent assistant, what prevents us from deleting names, national identification numbers, and other sensitive personal information before uploading? The employee, the mother, and the business owner will open these applications tomorrow, and this is not a flaw. The only flaw is thinking that we have not paid. Free services are not gifts; they are contracts we signed without reading them! Dr. Dhafer Adel Al-Huwail
