Google and TikTok may seem free, but every click and scroll you make gets packaged into a "user profile" and sold to advertisers. Take Facebook, for example—it makes about $50 per user per year just from their data. In the internet age, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
yeah it’s “free” but really you are paying with it with your data and your continuous use of these platforms is what pays their bills you just don’t notice it because you are using it to your benefits so it seems free but in reality almost nothing is free anymore these days
so many things that we don’t notice for example ads that are shown to us may seem nothing to you but may actually affect you a lot heavier than you think
Yes, they make money in their own way from their users, for example, in Facebook you run ads which we pay money for, watch reels, upload images and videos, even streaming on tiktok uses a while lot of data. They have signed agreement with these service provider companies and everywhere themselves with the data that users burns to keep up with the platforms.
I cannot agree it's free especially with the increase in tariffs in my country and we now get less data for more money and we still use these data to engage with social media. So in the end we spend good money to use it.