For Google, the most profitable thing (to my understanding) is advertisement on product-seeking queries. If you look and a SERP for a privacy-invading search, l

For Google, the most profitable thing (to my understanding) is advertisement on product-seeking queries. If you look and a SERP for a privacy-invading search, like Googling someone's name or email address, you'll notice that there are not really so many ads. I tried searching for my real name, my real name with my locale, and my email address. I was able to find an old breached password and I was able to find my home address, but I didn't see any ads. You could argue that this feature provides some halo benefit to Google's more profitable queries, but to be honest it seems like a stretch to me. For Facebook, they make money from advertising to logged in users. Broadly speaking, they keep users logging in by offering users the ability to broadcast private information to friends, and by offering the ability to receive such broadcasts from friends. To the extent FB does invade privacy, they do so to more effectively advertise to users on their site. They don't make the results of that invasion -- the profiles they build from their tracking bits, in other words -- available for public search. What's available for public search is instead only what the users choose to broadcast about themselves. The exposure of private information to public search engines is not what is profitable about either of these companies. It's an incidental effect of the persistence of digital storage and the difficulty of curating what is stored.