Abstract
It is Christmas and your aunt has knitted a scarf for you. It is beautiful, useful, and youneeded it. In fact, you love it. You feel that she cares about you and understands yourwishes. You are most grateful for such a thoughtful gift. It seems that everybody ishappy. How can there be anything wrong with such a win-win scenario? This is thesame rhetorical question asked by many defenders of free online services. The answeris supposed to be stronger than a mere Bnothing^. It is supposed to be a much morepositive Bthere is everything right with this!^. Indeed, the new rhetorical questionbecomes Bwhat’s wrong with you, killjoy?^. For the digital gifts from Baidu,Expedia, Facebook, Flickr (Yahoo!), Google, Instagram (Facebook), LinkedIn,Microsoft, Tencent, TripAdvisor, Tumblr (Yahoo!), Twitter, Yahoo!, YouTube(Google), WhatsApp (Facebook) and all the other thousands of digital aunts, we seemto have online ensure that we, the giftees, are part of the information society, that weliveonthegoodsideofthedigital divideandthatweenjoyalltheamazingfruitsofourtechnological developments. And all these, free of charge. They make every day feellike Christmas.End of story? Not quite. Think more carefully and critically and you will realise thatBtimeo Danaos et dona ferentes^ may still apply. The Latin phrase means BIfeartheGreeks even when they bear gifts^.IntheAeneid, Virgil makes the Trojan priestLaocoon utter this now proverbial line, in his attempt to warn the Trojans not to acceptthe famous wooden horse left by the Greeks as an apparent gift. We know how it ends.And yet, we seem to be falling into the same trap. Let me explain.Thedigital giftswearereceivinghavethreefeaturesthatshouldmakeusthinktwicebefore we accept them gratefully. I already mentioned the first: they are indeedenabling us in countless ways and immensely more than a simple scarf. It is hard toimagine what life would be like without them for anyone so used to rely on them daily.This is why they work; when they do, they become an essential part of our onlife
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