About a year ago, I was burned out from classes, work and life in general. For nearly a month, I ignored everyone, friends and family included. I was too deep in my own head to care. One of those days, while mindlessly scrolling Instagram, an ad stopped me cold. A woman with apparent concern in her eyes calmly said, “Not picking up calls from your loved ones, not answering texts, staying in your room all day isn’t normal, and it’s not healthy.” Of course, it ended with the usual ‘buy our product’ sales pitch. Suddenly, I started getting bombarded with similar ads.

I always thought these platforms used targeted ads based on my search history, my likes and what I watched. But I had neither googled nor had I watched reels of that kind. So why was I suddenly flooded with these ads? I felt violated. It was as if the phone’s camera was its eye; watching me silently all this time, smirking in the dark, patiently waiting for the perfect moment to throw these ads in my face. I couldn’t shake this off at all. After thinking about it for a while, I remembered all these apps I was getting calls on: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by the same corporation: Meta and at the centre of it all, Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta’s market cap is approximately $1.55 trillion, and Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth as of July is $237 billion. But the services he provides are all free. I have never paid a dollar to use any of those apps. So where does all this money come from? The answer is simple. This is just the classic case of “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” Meta and other tech companies are in the business of selling their users, which is you and billions of people. It sounds like ancient history now, but do you remember when entire families would gather in the living room to watch a movie or a big sports match together? During the ad breaks, we all saw the same commercials. I might have been into Nike shoes, my brother obsessed with Jordans, and my mom might be into makeup kits, yet we all had to watch the same Pepsi ad. Your TV didn’t know anything about you, and personalisation wasn’t possible.

But today, even if we’re all watching the same game or the same show, the experience is completely different. We’re each staring at our own separate screens, and those screens know us too well. I’ll get served the Nike ad, my brother will see the Jordan one, and my mom will get the makeup promotion. The ad break that once united us now divides us into perfectly targeted little bubbles. And some people might argue that this is a fair tradeoff, even a net positive. After all, the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. It shows you exactly what you want, making it easier and faster to discover products, trends and content you think you need. While it may feel harmless on the surface, the reality is far more invasive.

Everything we do online is being tracked and measured. The algorithm knows exactly which image you stop on and how long you look at it. It knows when you’re happy, when you’re sad, when you’re secretly looking at photos of your ex, what time you go to sleep, and what time you wake up. It knows whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, along with many other aspects of your personality. Although these are only predictions, they are becoming increasingly accurate. Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls this ‘behavioural futures markets’, a system where predictions about what you will do next are packaged and sold before you even do them. These platforms have collected more information about us than has ever been imagined in human history. All this data that we constantly pour out is being fed into highly automated systems, building sharper models of who we are and what we think.

I am not a customer for Meta. That would be the woman in that ad, the one trying to sell me something while I was shut off from the world. When an advertiser pays Meta to run an ad, they are not just buying exposure. They are buying certainty. Meta doesn’t just promise that your ad will be seen. It gives them certainty that the right eyes will see it, at the right moment, in the right state of mind. The woman paid Meta to reach me at the time I was most likely to buy what she was selling. That makes her the customer, me the product, and Meta the middleman that brought us together. Its entire business model is built on this. Billions of users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp locked into an ecosystem they use every single day, the decades of accumulated behavioural data that no competitor can replicate and the ownership over the platforms and the ad auction system. Put all of that together, and the trillion-dollar valuation starts to make a lot more sense.

The User Interface (UI) is designed so the scroll feels effortless so that even at midnight, half asleep, your thumb keeps moving. There is no progress bar, no signal that time is passing. Every small decision in the interface, down to where each button is placed and how a video transitions to the next, was made by an engineer whose job was to keep you there longer. The app was not designed for your convenience. It was designed for your captivity.

Three years ago, Dino Ambrosi, a digital wellness speaker, in a TED Talk titled ‘The battle for your time’, presented a chart that mapped the life of an average 18-year-old. Assuming they’d live to 90, he calculated they’d have 864 months left. He calculated that an average person spends 288 months sleeping, 126 months at work and school, 36 months cooking, 27 months in hygiene, 36 months on chores, and 18 months driving. That leaves you with 334 months of free time. This is when you live your life. Realising that we can live only 334 out of possible 864 months of our lives, I am sure none of us wants to spend this time scrolling through social media.

According to DataReportal, the global average screen time sits at 6 hours and 40 minutes per day. That’s every single person in this world giving away more than a quarter of their day to Mark Zuckerberg for the rest of their lives. Well, count me out. I want to live, take risks, make mistakes, fail on my own terms, and find my way through life. I only got this one life, and I don’t want to give it away to Mark Zuckerberg. Do you?