User Privacy... and why there is no free lunch

This is a story about an amusement park that offered to let users amuse themselves for free and how in the long run the users felt they were giving away too much in exchange for free amusement. Any resemblance to an ongoing debate about user privacy is completely intentional.

Sometime back, a company decided to let users come in to their amusement park for FREE (yes, completely free) and use any of the best equipments they had there. The users paid nothing but just provided some basic information about themselves. The park invested a lot in great equipments and you could even bring your friends and family along... in fact you were totally encouraged to. 

The company's business model was pretty innovative. They allowed retailers, enterprises, educational institutes, healthcare providers, financial institutes and almost anyone else for that matter to put up store fronts within the park and charged them for it, which enabled the upkeep of the park. Those businesses made money when the users bought stuff from them. But for you, the amusement seeker, the park was still FREE, even if you did not buy anything from these shops. Thats great!!! Nothing can go wrong, right???

Wrong!!! Read on...

In exchange for all this, the users only had to attend a long and extremely boring intro session about how the amusement park worked and what the users were entitled to and not entitled to. Of course, you don't HAVE to sit through the session, but just SAY you did and the company would be nice enough to take your word for it. They didn't want to wasting time on the boring session, they wanted you to have fun!

The equipments were all great and people brought it their entire friends and families and spent massive amounts of time in the park, but slowly the store fronts also increased. On last count, there are more store fronts than equipments there, but hey, many of the store fronts are pretty fun to hang around too. Soon enough, no noticed the difference between a great equipments and a great store front.

The trouble really started when some of the store fronts started selling products very different from what they claimed and what theses thought they were buying. In addition, it was also discovered that the company provided your information to some of the store fronts, who in turn sold it to some one else, though they were not supposed to. Which is really when the users started questioning what they had been giving away for all that amusement

On deeper analysis, it turned out that the amusement park knew a lot about the users, even during times when they were NOT in the amusement park. The amusement park was so nice that they tracked what you did at home and at work to present more "relevant" store fronts to you. Whats more, the park even knew a lot about your friends who hadn't even set foot on the park (yes, there were a few people among the billions who didn't visit).

If the users were shocked with all this, they really shouldn't have been. This is exactly what was called out in the boring intro session that the users claimed they had sat through, understood and agreed to, but did not.

The company now faces a huge public outrage and has claimed they would do everything possible to protect your information, and I'm sure they will. 

However, next time you set foot on a free park and partake free amusement, do realize that there are no free lunches.