this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Can you walk me through your logic that Google would sell your data? Who would they sell your data to, exactly, and how would that be financially advantageous to them?
Google makes money predominantly on ads.
Correct, roughly 78% of their revenue is from ads.
What question are you answering?
Ad business is centered around profiling people, trading this data with other ad companies to enrich those profiles, and using it to shove ads down your throat. Thought it was common knowledge, sorry. Here's more in depth explanation: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and
I know ad business, I don't know what question you're answering. Clearly not the ones raised.
It's common practice in a conversation to respond to the questions asked, not to the ones in your head. sorry if you didn't knew that
This one:
No, you're not answering that at all.
Google is an ad company. They sell ad spaces. They use the data to give you "tags" that the companies that want to buy ads will use to know how interesting you're for them and bid on that ad. They don't get the data, they don't know who you are. They know an age range, estimated income level, and interests. That's all. That information is what's used for targeted ads.
But it's fine, keep pretending you know what you're talking about. I'm sure you know first hand all of this
Have you considered taking a look at EFF report that I linked?
As somebody who is very deeply integrated with ad integrations that include the ones listed in the article—AdWords and AdMob—there are no insights provided to me as an advertiser or any other bidder regarding individual data. Perhaps the EFF would like to research this topic in some more detail.
There is simply no data for me to obtain, no insights for me to dig into, no aggregated collections for me to unpack, no anonymized groups for me to attempt to drill into. With honest sincerity, I just don't know what the EFF is trying to accomplish with that article. I genuinely feel that this article is taking a native approach to the creative use of "sale" and undermines their credibility.
If an advertiser like me can't obtain this data that's supposedly for sale, then where is it being sold? We instead begin to navigate down a path regarding the choice of the user: do you prefer personalized ads or non-personalized ads? If you have chosen for personalized ads, then it will be Google and Google alone that will bucket you into groups to perform bidding towards interests that you group into.
Then coming back to the original question: where exactly does Google sell your data?