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?
That’s what I thought. So they do in a sense sell our data but not directly.
I think they profile individuals and sell those profiles to ad companies, or in the case of google (ad company AND source of data) they pair ads to devices that fit a profile for the ad, like “rides a bike”, “risk averse”, “owns several cats” would be a profile for an ad selling cat bike seats that can hold 4 cats. That’s one way of using the data but there are many more, each more nefarious than the previous one, I guess culminating with Cambridge Analytica, especially their African endeavours.
Btw is your username in reference to the band can?
You’d be surprised how blatantly companies sell very personal data on a person. Google’s not going to do it openly because of pr, but a little subsidiary might
Google probably isn’t going to sell everything, but it’s pretty likely there’s an offshoot company who will sell individual data.
Their data is indeed their golden goose, but if they sell data for individuals at $300 or even $10 a pop, no one is going to get enough of their dataset to compete. They could even rate limit… Although if companies start to pay a billion or 10 to get full data dumps on a country, they might refocus on collection.
After all, the data isn’t the true golden goose… It’s the golden eggs that they process and sell. It’s their ability to collect data that’s most valuable
I challenge you to produce a shed of evidence that Google sells user data.
