[andrewla]

The idea that Google gets value from gmail user data is simply false. The pushback from when Google first tried to do ads on gmail was enough to kill the idea permanently.

Gmail is a legacy of Old Google, like Maps -- it serves no profit motive, just engineers building something cool for everyone with some sort of flimsy pretext of "it keeps users in our ecosystem" tacked on to it. Google now does have a premium-ish offering, "Google One", in an attempt to get some money out of gmail, but really it's just an artifact.

Companies giving things away for free or steeply discounted from the cost of goods sold is a perennial issue when it comes to centralized capital; Google has a pool of infinite money (search ads) and it uses that to buy its way into a bunch of markets where it is incredibly difficult to compete. Maybe early on you could have stopped Youtube or Maps based on standing antitrust law, but personal email has always been given away for free long before Google got into the business, so a product would have to offer something phenomenal to break into that space.

Doesn't utterly stop it; for example Google has had various versions of chat over the years but they have been roundly whooped by Slack.

[card_zero]

Maps advertises businesses for free? And without tracking the user's possible interest in spending money on particular things? Really?

[andrewla]

True -- I let nostalgia get in the way of reality here. For a long time Google didn't even try to monetize maps, and then they did a bunch of unsuccessful tweak to try to squeeze some money out of it.

Last time I checked Maps was still wildly unprofitable -- too many use cases of maps are searching for a particular destination rather than a general class of things, and balancing ad results and organic results has been something Google has gone back and forth on.

The extent to which Google uses user data from maps searches to track user interest is pretty overblown; there's a lot of struggle involved in trying to extract even slightly useful information.

But things like browsing maps, satellite pictures, and turn by turn directions are straightforward losses for Google, and reflect that earlier spirit.

[card_zero]

My impression is that it's the other way round: presumably via my card number, purchases I make at local businesses cause those businesses to appear more prominent on the map. They get unique icons, and are visible when zoomed out even to a range of five miles. Tracking is applied to the adverts on maps, I think, just like ads in search.

[bitnasty]

There ARE ads in gmail