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My understanding is that Google sells targeted advertising, not dossiers or personal data. Is that incorrect?

• Spooky23 4y ago
  Sort of. You can use Google to push targeted messaging to people based on the dossiers you collect. They don’t sell the dossier, but they can leverage it. In many cases they can make inferences without the dossier. For example, you can target anti-opioid or anti-extremist materials at people identified as risks. For example, you can target every pregnant woman in a geography and score her risk of giving birth to a child with an opioid addiction. That child will cost a health insurer ~$2M, so targeted ads that convert to intervention are very high value. Where it gets weird is you can reverse engineer the dossier at scale. You can target very specific conditions without google “selling” that data to you. If you’re a 50 year old male searching for divorce attorneys who moved 6 times, the context of searching for “pain killers” or “target range” may have a different context than if you’re an 18 year old athlete booking a cabin in rural Maine.