[hedora]

Selling targeting information about me is a form of “selling my data”.

Out of $160b in revenue in 2019, $134b of Google’s revenue came from ads. Most of the ad revenue is in the form of targeted ads, so if they stopped selling people’s information, they’d immediately go under.

Similar numbers apply to Facebook.

I honestly don’t understand where this argument that those companies don’t sell people’s information comes from. I hear it often enough to wonder if people are intentionally being disingenuous, astroturfing, etc...

[manfredo]

Nor are they selling targeted information. When I purchase ads targeting a specific demographic, I don't get to see who was served ads. I could correlate this with new customers following the ad campaign, but the same could be done by airing TV ads in specific households and doing the same correlation.

You seem to have a much more expansive idea of what selling information means as compared to other commenters. Google collects information so that when a customer buys ads, they can serve those ads to the desired demographics. They don't sell info on which users belong to which demographics or other otherwise sell user information. While it's true that they monetize information in optimizing their ad placement, this is not what most people think of when they hear "selling user information.

Say I have a nail salon and I want to advertise. So I give out coupons to bakeries, coffee shops, etc. and tell storekeepers to hand out the coupons the customer's demographics (women, mostly, and maybe women with fancy nails in particular). When these storekeepers kept an eye out for women with fancy nails and gave them my coupon, did the sell their customer's information?

[lma21]

(nor the original op) Indeed, you're making quite a valid point, and we, as users of Google's services, have accepted this policy the day we started using their services for free.

Don't want Google to benefit off your browsing-data? you can stop using their services.

Now, the question becomes, is that actually possible? If I stop using Google Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc. would they stop collecting my "user data"?

I can replace Google with Facebook/Amazon/Criteo/... or anyone involved in the ad-retargeting business.

[manfredo]

If you stopped using their services they wouldn't be able to collect your user data.

[bryan_w]

Both Google and FB are ad distributors so the data they have is their gold. They would never hand out csv or database dumps to anyone as that would potentially give their competition an advantage. There are companies where you can buy email lists or other information about certain demographics, but that's not Google or Facebook's business.

That's why people say Google or FB sell data.