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It's a myth that Google literally sells your information to advertisers. It uses your information to show you advertisements which both it and its advertiser
by tytso 9y ago
It's a myth that Google literally sells your information to advertisers. It uses your information to show you advertisements which both it and its advertisers hopes are relevant and useful (so you will click on them). If you think about it, that business model essentially requires that the ads not be too annoying, because if they are, people will use ad blockers and the business model dies.
The really annoying ads which auto-play videos, block content, etc., tend to be served by companies who aren't taking the long view --- which is why Chrome is going to be adding adblocking for those ads that are ultra-annyoing early next year.
There's a pretty big difference between "using your information for marketing", and "marketing your information to advertisers". The second implies that your private information is getting divulged for a price, and that's simply not true.
- freshhawk 9y agoThere is less of a difference between those than there seems to be, there are a lot of interesting research papers and experiments regarding methods to create a feedback loop between targeting ads and then identifying those targeted. If I narrowly target an ad and then I know you saw it, I now know all those things about you. So, yes, they do not literally sell your information, there is one level of indirection there. And the amount of information that data brokers get their hands on tells me that it is very likely people are exporting this information regularly.