I can’t entirely be bothered addressing this post (which is, as @cheetah notes, lifted from elsewhere). Nonetheless, I’d like to grab a couple of snippets from the post I made on ONO just after I was “retired”.

“You are not the product”

Yes, you are. When the company is seeking investors, either institutional or via its ICO, you can be sure that the number of users are a factor in the associated marketing. Eventually, once there are enough users, the internal advertising market will come on-line. Advertisers, even if they are other users, want “eyes-on” - they want to know that their ONOTs are buying views from another human. I have news for you copper-top, that’s you.

Of course, I was a little...disappointed... when I was writing this, but the fact remains that while user data might not be sold As it would be by Facebook, users are most certainly a selling point, particularly where advertisers are concerned.

A much shorter refutation to the “you are not the product” idea is actually contained in the post itself: “if the product is free, then chances are that you are the product.” I don’t remember ONO costing anything to download or use...