If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product
A common statement I’ve been reading since last one decade. and it has been proved time and time again. You are the Product when you are using a free service.
Read: This is Why WhatsApp is Free, or Should We Say Why Facebook Made it Free
In this post, we talk about how WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, saves all your conversations, photos, status messages, location information and uses this data to serve it’s Advertisers to show better ads and have a better chance of converting their Target audience.
I’m going to show you two screenshots, one, of WhatsApp where there is a conversation going on for a next weekend adventure trip.
And second, of Instagram which is showing a sponsored post of the same adventure trip. The post is trying to sell a package for the trip.
You can see the keywords like Desser, Safari is used in the Conversation, at 11:50 PM.
And the similar ad starts appearing in the Instagram Feed at around 2:40, within just a few hours.
What is interesting to nowhere is, one of the people is in Dubai, so they are also aware of the Location of the users.
It may sound creepy initially, but if we stop and wait for a moment, then it’s actually good for the users, who can get last minute deals for an activity/product on their phones.
Also, WhatsApp helps over 1 billion people communicate with their friends and family, in the form of text, photos, emojis, voice notes, voice calls, videos calls. The groups have made lives simply for people working on projects,
The groups have made lives simply for people working on projects, small teams, society groups, study groups etc.
It takes millions of dollars fuel this kind of service, and we use it for Free. IMHO, being shown Ads similar to our interests is a small price to pay. Let us know what you think.