Storage is the product you see. Your data is the product they sell.

I wrote that line about file-sharing platforms. Dropbox. Google Drive. WeTransfer. The cozy cartel of free services that quietly turn your personal files into training fuel, ad targeting, or both.

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized it isn’t really about file sharing. It’s the operating principle of almost every consumer tech product built in the last twenty years the unwritten line at the bottom of every terms-of-service agreement.

You think you’re using the product. You are the product.

Every contract you uploaded to Google Drive, every brief you sent through Dropbox, every design file you passed through WeTransfer , all of it is now either in a training set or on the roadmap to be. The model learns your vocabulary, your arguments, your techniques, your domain expertise. Then it turns around and helps someone with a cheaper price and less experience produce work that looks just like yours.

You trained your replacement for free. You paid for the storage that did it.