Do they sell data or sell services using data they collect? Honest question.
I believe generally not. They sell the results of processed data, but the data is their golden goose. Why sell it wholesale, when you can charge for every use of it?
If anything they’d be buying since they’re the ones presenting ads… The whole data selling discussion online is always ridiculous. Who are these mystical data buyers ready to shell out billions for crappy “data” (does anyone participating in these discussions actually have a definition of what they think this ridiculously non specific ““data”” even is?) to present slightly better ads to users? Why would Google sell this data, shouldn’t they want to keep it to themselves?
selling your data refers to people buying ads and being like I want to show my dog food ad to 100,000 people who have a dog, and then Google only shows the ad to people who have a dog
I know of a SaaS company that charges for their products to end users for a monthly fee. They make significantly more money selling the data of their users to 3rd parties than they do from subscriptions. Also, they figured this out after the fact, it wasn’t a core business component when they launched, but they still ended up raising the monthly fees due to “inflation”.
Where do I go to buy a list of your location history off Google if it’s not true?
Ok I just went down a very deep internet rabbit hole and went from believing google definitely sells data to it doesn’t sell data to it sells data (kinda). I’d recommend this article on RTB’s which explains how google advertisements actually work and how they leak your data (including your location).
I’d also recommend watching the short video by Brave linked in the article - I didn’t understand the first part but the actual article explains it quite well, the end is the juicy part.
Hope this helps!
