[dleslie]

They track and consume and correlate/associate everything. That is their business: they sell their ability to know everything about you to anyone willing to pay for that information. All of their products feed into their core business.

Google is the most invasive and predatory attack on privacy ever; by no small margin.

[SquareWheel]

>they sell their ability to know everything about you to anyone willing to pay for that information

Can you prove this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that's a real whopper of a claim.

[bravoetch]

It's not an extraordinary claim, it's literally what google claim to do by selling targeted ads.

[dleslie]

It's somewhat concerning that anyone would consider it an extraordinary claim.

I wonder how it is that they think Google rationalises providing so many free or below cost products to consumers?

Edit: downvoted without response. K.

[SquareWheel]

Where do I buy this user data? I would like to purchase it. dleslie claims they will sell it to "anyone willing to pay for that information".

> it's literally what google claim to do

It's literally the opposite of what Google claims to do.

https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/

[zaroth]

Please be more charitable with your interpretation if you want to debate the merits of what is being claimed.

> they sell their ability to know everything about you to anyone willing to pay for that information

This does not actually claim they will sell you a copy of the raw data. That is Google’s “crown jewels” and they protect it fairly well, although not always perfectly.

In the past you could see the query on a referral URL. In the past you could see PII coming through this way as well. You could target ads against this PII, etc.

But anyway, what Google does is let you target ads based on their absolute knowledge of the user. What you are Searching for, where you are Searching for it, etc.

Google tracks you incensently so that they can more effectively sell things to you, or sell others the ability to sell things to you.

But increasingly it seems that Google tracks its users just because it can. Just in case that clickstream or that app history or that voice recording might become useful someday. Google tracks you like a paranoid government might track its citizens, afraid that some scrap of data might come back one day to be useful in its almighty question for [control / dollars / training an AI / optimization / whatever].

The nominal cost of storing one more piece of metadata is zero, the potential future value seemingly limitless, and perhaps the fear of Management asking for some piece of data you didn’t think to record is so great, they seem to just record all the things.

[SquareWheel]

>This does not actually claim they will sell you a copy of the raw data.

That's fair. That was my misreading of their original comment. I'm so used to seeing this misinformation I took it as just another example.

>But anyway, what Google does is let you target ads based on their absolute knowledge of the user.

That's right. The page I linked from Google is actually very transparent about how it works.

[dleslie]

Thank you, you said it better than I would have.

[shadowprofile76]

You buy this information indirectly any time you use any of Google's targeted advertising services. And yes, anyone can buy into it.

[SquareWheel]

>buy this information indirectly...

Which means what?

If you aren't actually getting user information, then simply put you aren't buying user information. Anything else is twisting words to distort their meanings.

[shadowprofile76]

You know exactly what it means and maybe you're moving into semantic disagreement. Google does not sell the raw user information itself to its paying customers but it does sell it indirectly by giving them access to excellent targeting tools based on all those things it knows about you, me and X and Y individuals. Maybe im not being perfectly precise but to me that fits the bill for buying information indirectly.

[dleslie]

> That is their business: they sell their ability to know everything about you to anyone willing to pay for that information.

Google has information about you. Incredibly detailed, intimate information about you. Harvested by collecting and correlating all of your usage of their products and services.

Anyone can pay Google to use that knowledge in pursuit of other services, like targeted ads. No, you do not get access to that knowledge directly, but Google has it and is using it when paid to do so.

In effect, you can pay Google to have indirect use of that knowledge.