Ello claims that on its site, that’s no longer the case. They’re tapping into not just a general feeling of vague discomfort surrounding Facebook as a place, but also the long-bubbling resentment about Facebook’s revenue generating practices. A site that can be Facebook without being Facebook is something people are clearly hungry for.

But here’s the thing about Ello’s manifesto—something that Ian Aleksander Adams, the director of information architecture and UI/UX at Hedvig Inc. an infrastructure startup, pointed out to me (on Facebook, of course): Ello doesn’t have to be storing and selling your information for you to be the product.

Adams, who also volunteers as community architect at the non-profit Internet Archive, said that we tend to think of “being a product” as being something that somebody can sell. In Facebook terms, that means being a human with interests and desires that companies can use to better understand how to sell you things. But there are lots of ways you can be the product of a website without them selling your data to advertisers, Adams notes.

The fact that you, the user, even exist and use their site makes you a product. Ello already has some amount of seed funding from VCs, which means it will need to return to them with something in hand if it wants more. And when it does, or when it is eventually bought by a larger company, you are part of that transaction—a key line in the sales pitch. Your existence on that site is a unit of currency, and it’s a unit that Ello is selling to whoever will give them money for it.

And even if Ello fails to make money, if it isn’t able to successfully execute on the freemium model it has talked about (and many sites don’t), you are still currency in the form of promotion for Ello’s founders. You’re a line on their resume that gets them that next job, or that next seed money for that next startup: Founder, Ello, 200,000 users (hey look, that’s you!).

“If Ello was serious about their 'manifesto' they'd be non-profit,” Adams told me. But Ello’s founders have to sell something, whether it’s to VCs or companies. And that something is always going to be you.

You might decide that being that kind of currency—the kind that promotes investment, hiring and promotion of this companies and these people—is fine with you. It might be preferable to the Facebook model of tracking your every move and selling that information to advertisers. But you are still the product.

Being the product isn't inherently a bad thing, either. In many cases, users are willing to be the product in exchange for some service they want, and that's totally fine. The premise that turning your users into a product as inherently evil (which is what Ello's manifesto is arguing) ignores the reality of what people are comfortable with. Ello's manifesto seems to miss what the true issues with Facebook are. Building the anti-Facebook social network doesn't necessarily have to mean building a social network that claims to do the opposite of everything Facebook does.