[elmo2you]

> To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable

That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.

Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.

Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning/intentions). However, that's what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn't take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding/regulating absolute monopolies).

[j7ake]

Is google mining photos for profit?

What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?

[freeflight]

I would be very surprised if Google is not data mining everything they can, it's always been their main business model.

With the photos it could be as simple as merging the meta data from those photos together with a user profile for even more targeted advertising.

Somebody making a lot of photos of certain things might be more interested in buying these things.

I'm pretty sure the real data wizards can think of quite a few more, and better, ways to monetize such data, particularly at the scale that Google is collecting it.

[laacz]

I believe they can't do that without explicitly stating such usage of data in terms of service.

[freeflight]

Very well paid teams of lawyers have spent considerable time and effort writing these terms of services. In the case of Google there is so much of this stuff, for all the different services, that Google doesn't even have a single conclusive ToS document, but instead a whole website [0]

Good luck finding anything explicitly stated in there.

[0] https://policies.google.com/terms

[autoexec]

> What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?

Are you asking why data is valuable or what data can be found in photos? They could pour over every detail captured on camera taking note of locations, any products seen the background of your shots, the types of clothes you and your family/friends wear, who wears or doesn't wear makeup, etc) then they can use facial recognition to identify everyone in your pictures (photographed intentionally or not) and determine their relationships to you and each other then update everyone's dossiers with whatever new information they managed to gather from your pics.

Or they could just jerk off to your nudes. Who knows.

[aitchnyu]

Google Photos could track a persons travel and dining and things we are fond of. Google Pay could track which friends we pay money to and where we hang out. An tourism council could target drinking buddies of somebody who visited there.

[T0pU3er]

1 picture is worth a 1000 google adwords

[cloverich]

From photos you can find every person you (in person) know, everywhere you've gone, everything you do, everything you own (and don't). So long as it shows up in a picture once. If storage for 200gb costs _them_ a couple bucks, and that's the price of a few ad (conversions), it would seem to work out. I'm an outsider of course, would be interesting to understand the actual economics from someone more familiar with the details. Of course, if the story were this rosy they obviously wouldn't be charging. So I'm sure its quite a bit more nuanced than this.

[lallysingh]

Facial recognition for who else is in the picture. They've never had a good social graph like Facebook. This is one way to construct one.

[npongratz]

Alphagoog is an advertising company. Everything they do is focused on efficient selling of advertising. They will perform any surveillance they can in order to improve the profile they have of you, regardless of your status as a registered user of their services.

[KptMarchewa]

Data for training neural networks?

[CydeWeys]

Is unlabeled data even useful for that purpose?

[cloverich]

Unsupervised learning can identify all the distinct people (and animals) in every photo you've taken. Then they ask you "who is this"?

[throwaway3699]

Very little. I think training data for image classification is one benefit.

Google conspiracy theories are just HN's preferred sport.

[nogabebop23]

... says the person hiding behind a throw-away account