Stole. The NSA steals data from companies like Google. That’s why, for example, everything in data centers and everything sent between them is encrypted.
I believe generally not. They sell the results of processed data, but the data is their golden goose. Why sell it wholesale, when you can charge for every use of it?
I think they profile individuals and sell those profiles to ad companies, or in the case of google (ad company AND source of data) they pair ads to devices that fit a profile for the ad, like “rides a bike”, “risk averse”, “owns several cats” would be a profile for an ad selling cat bike seats that can hold 4 cats. That’s one way of using the data but there are many more, each more nefarious than the previous one, I guess culminating with Cambridge Analytica, especially their African endeavours.
Btw is your username in reference to the band can?
You’d be surprised how blatantly companies sell very personal data on a person. Google’s not going to do it openly because of pr, but a little subsidiary might
Google probably isn’t going to sell everything, but it’s pretty likely there’s an offshoot company who will sell individual data.
Their data is indeed their golden goose, but if they sell data for individuals at $300 or even $10 a pop, no one is going to get enough of their dataset to compete. They could even rate limit… Although if companies start to pay a billion or 10 to get full data dumps on a country, they might refocus on collection.
After all, the data isn’t the true golden goose… It’s the golden eggs that they process and sell. It’s their ability to collect data that’s most valuable
I don’t have a smoking gun for you, but I’ve got a dozen lawsuits saying that Google is lying about their assertion that they don’t sell user data
It’s not proof, but it’s very telling… I’m not saying that Google is directly selling user info, I’m saying that you can buy a list of credit card purchases made by any individual from Equifax for $200
Google isn’t selling information directly, but it sure as hell seems like they’re selling it indirectly
I haven’t looked into the issue deeply, but a casual search has only reinforced my opinion
You think Equifax is buying data from Google? About credit card purchases? Google doesn’t even have access to that kind of data. It’s credit processors and credit bureaus that are selling you out. Credit bureaus openly do what people accuse Google of doing, yet the complaints about selling data are always directed at Google. People running credit bureaus must be laughing their asses off.
If anything they’d be buying since they’re the ones presenting ads… The whole data selling discussion online is always ridiculous. Who are these mystical data buyers ready to shell out billions for crappy “data” (does anyone participating in these discussions actually have a definition of what they think this ridiculously non specific ““data”” even is?) to present slightly better ads to users? Why would Google sell this data, shouldn’t they want to keep it to themselves?
selling your data refers to people buying ads and being like I want to show my dog food ad to 100,000 people who have a dog, and then Google only shows the ad to people who have a dog
I know of a SaaS company that charges for their products to end users for a monthly fee. They make significantly more money selling the data of their users to 3rd parties than they do from subscriptions. Also, they figured this out after the fact, it wasn’t a core business component when they launched, but they still ended up raising the monthly fees due to “inflation”.
Ok I just went down a very deep internet rabbit hole and went from believing google definitely sells data to it doesn’t sell data to it sells data (kinda). I’d recommend this article on RTB’s which explains how google advertisements actually work and how they leak your data (including your location).
I’d also recommend watching the short video by Brave linked in the article - I didn’t understand the first part but the actual article explains it quite well, the end is the juicy part.