Not Really Free.

Piltdown Man was right about the world not being ready. Look at the audience…
I’ve seen these nuts in concert. Somewhere I still have a signed copy of DK 50/80.

Nothing is really free. Nobody does anything for no return. Okay, you can argue there are people who do things for no monetary gain, I’ve done such things myself, but there isn’t zero return on that. Helping out other people feels good, you get a sort of internal return with that feeling you’ve helped someone out. Whether it’s just helping an old lady across the  road or volunteering every spare minute of your time to coach the school football team or giving up a few years of your life to volunteer in some remote village somewhere, you’re always getting that feel-good response. True altruism can only exist for those who think in purely monetary terms.

When I put out a free story, it’s not really free. With it comes adverts for the other books and stories. It’s really marketing.

I could wait around on a street corner handing out leaflets to advertise my books. Of the people who accept, nine out of ten leaflets will get binned without being looked at. One in a hundred might get properly read and one in a thousand might get a sale. That’s no use because it would cost more to print a thousand leaflets than I’d make from selling one book.

So I do it with free stories and I don’t push them. They are free, people who want that kind of story will pick one up and in the back are the adverts. That targets people who are broadly interested in the sort of thing I write. Even if it still only gets me one sale per thousand, at least it hasn’t cost me anything if I do it online.

I did get a few copies of individual stories printed and bound but at nearly £2 a time that’s not a cost-effective thing to give away. See, if I want to make money by giving away free stuff, the return generated by the free stuff must exceed the cost of giving away the free stuff. I can give away thousands online at no cost but I have to limit what I give away in print. The best use of those print copies is to leave them in the barber’s shop or the airport lounge where they can pass through multiple readings per copy.

I’m no economist but that all looks pretty straightforward to me.

So when you look at those free applications for smartphones, is it really any surprise that some of them are full of advertising? Is it so astounding that some of them are harvesting your data and following you by GPS? Why did you think they were free? Pure altruism? Sure, some put out a little game program for the thrill of saying ‘I did that’ and to say to future employers ‘Look, that was me’, but there aren’t as many as we’d all like to think.

As for this ‘Oh, they can tell where I am because they can track my phone’ – didn’t you know? Wasn’t that, in fact, a major selling point of these phones, that they can be tracked to within an inch if stolen and that you can give someone your location through the phone? They can find your nearest burger bar, pub, brothel or Tie Rack so it must be blindingly obvious even to an ASH drone that in order to do that it has to know exactly where you are.

How can you buy a phone that advertises its built-in trackability and then complain when someone tracks it? It’s only doing what it says on the tin, and you knew that when you put your money down.

With that feature, it was inevitable that some companies would want to get your location and travel info. Why? Nefarious purposes? Of course.

Where’s the best place to put up an expensive billboard advertising the latest pointless-but-fun gadget? Why, you’d want to put it somewhere that gadget-lovers will pass by in droves. Therefore, if you can get information on the places with the highest traffic of smart phone carriers, that’s where you put your advert.

Where do the geeks go on the internet? Where do the sporty types go? Where do the drinkers and the foodies go? Knowing that, you can maximise your advertising return by buying ad space in the right places. You already know where to find the smokers. Outside.

Yes, that information is valuable. You are not going to just give it away so it has to be enticed out of you by offering you something for free.

That is why I attach my ads to free stories. Those stories are picked up by people interested in the mildly scary but not too gory sort of tale and once they reach the end, there is a ‘By the same author’ section. I don’t leave the stories free forever. After a thousand downloads or so I’ll make them 99-cents and put out some new free ones. With my ads, they are just text and you can read them or not read them. Tech-savvy businesses can do a whole lot more, especially if it’s embedded in programming.

Nothing free is really free. Look at Farcebook. I’m on it (not as me) and it has tightly targeted advertising at the side. Say something and relevant ads appear. ‘Like’ something and relevant ads appear. That’s why Mr Zuckybucky is so rich from giving away a free service. Advertisers will pay in their own firstborn’s blood for ads so neatly targeted.

The thing that’s had me laughing lately is that every day there are one or two stories about how Farcebook or some other lot are harvesting all your smartphone data without you knowing – and then there’s an article saying ‘isn’t it great to be able to load your money onto your phone?’ Oh yes, great. Load your money onto a device that’s been proven to be eminently hackable with just a free game. What a great idea that is. What could possibly go wrong? I think I’ll stick with cash for now.

I don’t remember who originally said ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch’ but it’s true. Anyone giving anything for free wants something back and it’s not always clear what that is. Those Mafia dons might do you a big favour and help you out when you were having a hard time, but they’ll call that favour in one day.  Farcebook gives you a free service but in exchange, they want to know enough about you to be able to target those ads. The current clean-up isn’t about making Farcebook safer to use. It’s about getting rid of false accounts that skew the advertising data.

There is now a Terrible Outrage about Twitter making its historic tweets available to advertisers. Oh, but it was supposed to be free! Get real. Nothing goes on the internet for free. Someone has to pay for the programming and the computers and the maintenance. There is always a price for using it and if it’s not money, then it’s you.

I don’t use Twitter. If you’ve been reading here for more than a day, can you really imagine me condensing anything into 140 characters? Twitter is not for the likes of me. I have used LiveJournal, Blogger and now WordPress, all for free, but they aren’t really free.

The free blogs are samples. If you want to get into the real, full functionality of these things, there are many upgrades available at a range of prices and if you want to go all the way, you can make your WordPress blog into a proper website with all the bells and whistles. I don’t think Livejournal goes quite that far but there is certainly a higher-level paid option.

Blogger doesn’t, as far as I know, push for a paid blog but it does keep on about ‘monetising’ the blog. That’s where you let Google run ads based on your content and that must surely, instantly, make it clear that Google knows what your content is. Yes, you can use their stuff for free but they are looking over your shoulder while you do it. You’ll make a little bit of pocket change per ad but Google makes more. That’s not evil. That’s business.

All the free sites are watching content. Of course they are. That’s the price you’re not paying in order to have free access. I don’t mind at all. Everything I put here is public and available worldwide so why would I care if an advertising executive reads it? They could read it any time they wanted anyway.

The same goes for anything left public on Farcebook or Twitter. So the advertisers read it, do they? So could anyone on the planet with an internet connection. So Farcebook and Twitter have managed to sort the info and sell it to companies that could have got it all for free if they could have been bothered. There isn’t really that much of a difference to us as end users. Put your info on the net and anyone can see it, so complaining when someone does look at it is like those women in very low cut dresses who complain that you can’t remember their faces. Of course I can’t, I was too busy looking at the publically available information. Both of it.

There are only three reasons for a service to be free on the Internet, as far as I can see.

One – it’s a free sample to persuade you to upgrade to a paid product.

Two – it has advertising or information-harvesting buried in it, or

Three – it’s a Government-sponsored catch-the-bugger honey trap. This is slightly different in that governments don’t care about return on investment. They just spend what they like and take what they want in more taxes. A trap that catches one in a million while costing a million per test means nothing to them.

On number three, if you wanted to catch a load of paedos, the best way would be to set up a free-access site. No credit cards but simply Email verification, and you’d have them all rounded up in no time. The police must have quite a collection of horrible pictures by now and I for one would not be offended if they were on the Internet because I would never look at them.

You want to catch terrorists or that Anonymous group? Do it the way they caught Gary MacKinnon. Set up free proxies and leave a few computers open in government offices with stupid passwords. Easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how they caught the ones they have so far.

So yes, there are ways that free stuff can be used as part of enforcement and even as sneaky ways to hack into your gadgetry but come on, complaining that your smart phone reports your location when that was a big selling point in the first place is just silly. With all those CCTV and ANPR cameras, the government always knows where you are even if you have no phone at all.

The only question I’d have is, why would they care where I am? If they want to fill hard disk after hard disk with my daily meanderings, my only objection would be that my taxes are paying for it all. What’s it for? To combat terrorism? Collecting too much data is worse than collecting none at all. It’s like those Sky TV things that can record two programs at once. You can record 48 hours of TV every 24 hours and it is not possible for you to ever see it all. If there is something important in there it’s a needle in a haystack.

I mentioned eBay a few months back. Since then I have been spammed with eBay fake messages asking questions about listings even though I currently have nothing on there, and haven’t for over a year. Mention banks and watch those ‘reactivate your account’ phishers cast their lines. The spammers watch blogs too.

All advertisers can do is offer you something for sale. All you have to do is say ‘no thanks’.

If something is free, there is always, always a catch. If that catch is only advertising then that is the least of our worries.

If the government ever offers free Internet services, then it’s time to be scared.