[Gaelan]

You're right–people often conflate "selling" with "using internally to sell ads." There's a difference, and it's meaningful, but the point is that Google's business model is based on gathering and exploiting as much data about you as possible

[rapnie]

Yes. And isn't it also the case that, by offering their very elaborate targeting capabilities to advertisers, they still leak your personal data to 3rd parties, though indirectly? After all, the fact that a certain personalized ad appears in your page confirms to the advertiser that you are in their carefully crafted target group.

[skj]

(I work for Google, but not on ads and I have no social knowledge)

I think that one thing Google tries to do is to make identifyingly small demographics not possible. As you say, that would leak personal info when the user clicked.

[icebraining]

confirms to the advertiser

How would the advertiser know? Google is the one serving the ad.

[ehnto]

Tracking referals. It's a key part of ecommerce advertising metrics to keep track of who came from what campaign.

[ma2rten]

That's not true either, but that's a common misconception. Google makes the bulk of it's ad revenue from search ads. Two people issuing the same search query will see the same ads (for the most part). Hence, Google could still make money without user targeting - unlike Facebook.

[laumars]

Two people making the same search query wouldn't even produce the same search results, let alone adverts.

[ma2rten]

I'm surprised that this comment was downvoted so much. I actually work at Google. I don't know if anyone is still going to read this, but I thought I would comment just in case.

I said "for the most part". There are multiple reasons why different users can see different ads:

Ads might be geo targeted ("Only show this to users in New York.").

There is some stochasticity in the serving process. Ads can run out of budget. Different data centers might have cached different things in cache.

Different advertisers that are eligible to show for a certain query can bid different amounts depending on the user, for example though RLSA [1].

But anyway ads personalization is not essential to Google's business model (except display ads and maybe youtube ads).

[1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2701222?hl=en

[laumars]

I like how you say "personalised ads are now essential aside all those times it is". The fact remains, personalised ads is always going to be far more profitable than non-personalised ads. You don't need to be an insider in Google to understand this. Moreover Google didn't even invent the concept of personalised adverts to begin with.

I'm old enough to remember when we had the same arguements about supermarket loyalty cards which track your purchases and sends out personalised deals. Now people just accept that happens but there was a massive uproar about it back in the 80s or 90s (I forget precisely when but it was a good few years ago now).

I honestly don't blame Google for doing what they're doing. It makes perfect business sense. What I do object to is Google employees (assuming you are who you say you are) trying to argue that Google don't make a business from personalised ads when it's pretty easy to prove they do and nearly every single member of HN has observed that it action. For the record, I also object to people argue who "X is definitely not y" while acknowledging that there are a whole plethora of examples where their arguement isn't completely factually accurate - that kind of dumb get out clause is just insult on everyone's intelligence.