This article was published on March 23, 2015

‘Free’ is a lie: Watch this video now


‘Free’ is a lie: Watch this video now

Aral Balkan taps into our inner fears and asks uncomfortable questions. Probably everyone would be opposed to mailman going through our mail. So why don’t we mind that Google looks through our email?

We’ve just added Balkan’s talk at last year’s TNW Europe Conference to our TNW Video site and you can watch it right now for free. 

Balkan, founder of Ind.ie, discusses how companies like Google and Facebook promise us free services in exchange for the right to watch and study us; to mine and farm us. He claims that the brave new digital world of ‘corporate surveillance’ threatens our most fundamental freedoms.

Erik Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google, is telling us that if we have something we don’t want everyone to know, maybe we should not do it in the first place. Balkan, however, says that privacy is not about whether or not you have something to hide, privacy is about having control over what you want to share.

Is ‘free’ a threat to our civil liberties? If free is a lie, what is the true cost?

Watch the video to find out.

Watch more TNW Conference videos right now at TNW Video.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.