> Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.
These companies are in such a position, that they have so much data when selling it brings competitive disadvantage.
There is a competition going on from the control of the world, in terms of sophisticated A.I. development. This is where they are using their data. Ads are just little sidekick in the process anymore.
Also, they probably do everything with the data and a bit more than average data buyer would do.
> Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.¹
Yet this particular bit of information is too expensive to make accessible and useful. They have this giant correlation machine, and they don't use it to know as much as they can about their own company? How convenient.
I know, "one does not simply", but still: aren't you supposed to keep salary records anyway. Wouldn't you keep them even if you didn't have to, just in case? Wouldn't you run some statistics over them, just to see the trends?
Obviously, as rayiner says, Alphabet have other reason not to hand over the data.
> Now imagine them selling this data to the highest bidders.
A bit of a moot point, because Google not selling it is their business model. What Google might start selling pretty soon are predictions about people (and in some way they already do it) - but never the underlying data.
If Google starts failing, then I'd become really worried though. If they're desperate enough they might just sell the data off (at their own loss of course, but a business fighting for survival will go to any lengths possible...)
> But the value of my data alone probably is worth less than a dollar
Calculating the value of your data is pretty easy actually. Just take the market cap of the company divided by users to get an average.
Google is at about $700B with may ~2B global users, so global average is more like $350/user. The value of US users is probably 10X less developed parts of world (based on ad rates) so US users are worth more like $3000.
You are undervaluing yourself :) which is how they win.
> Google takes your data and sells it. Literally making your data available to the highest bidder.
No, Google takes money to present ads to people of different demographics, and uses your data to do that. It doesn’t sell your data, which is, in fact their competitive edge in ads – selling your data would be selling the cow when they’d prefer to sell the milk.
>the most desirable option would be a reliably "benevolent" mega-corp that could be trusted to prioritize the user experience while also horizontally integrating across product segments to create a unified service.
Why is that desirable? Its not to me. The most desirable outcome is open data exchange standards that allow data exchange so that ANYONE can build such a service.
Google locks-up publicly available data and they subsidize/price dump to offer services at no-cost so other players die out leaving them to manipulate the market as they see fit. Its the worst possible outcome for everyone involved.
Would breaking google into 4 companies give us 4 googles or 4 bings? Considering that the more data you have, the better your results, it seems like winner take all is the norm in any sort of data-driven tech.
> The real reason is that Google would prefer to kill the service than have it continue with another owner which would compete with other Google offerings. And compared to Google's overall value, they don't particularly need the sale price.
The other problem is that if it's a dead or dead-end service then who would buy it? Maybe VC is easier than I thought... Perhaps Google values services more than most. They certainly spend a lot when acquiring other companies. Who would pay $2B for Google Reader or Daydream?
I think the other thing that was unstated in my last comment is that a lot of Google products are not much more than a veneer over material design and a bigtable or spanner backend. What is there to sell aside from the concept, glue code, and design work? The data? Now there's something that would really get people up in arms.
If you want to argue that the data Google has is very valuable then I agree wholeheartedly. It's also not going to sell that data which would be suicide from a privacy perspective. Letting new products use existing data is also pretty valuable, but doesn't make the resulting product as useful to anyone else.
All the money comes from some of the users. Sure Google is collecting everyone's data, but in the end the vast majority of it is worthless. I'd be surprised if even 1% of users are profitable for the ecosystem. The tiny minority clicking on ads and buying products is subsidizing everyone else.
> Google takes your data and sells it. Literally making your data available to the highest bidder.
But it doesn't, does it? It sells the fact that it knows everything about everyone and can get any ad to the perfect people for it. It's not going on the open market and telling people I regularly buy 12 lbs of marshmallow fluff and then use it in videos I keep on my google drive.
>And in this case, what do you think would be the motivation of companies like Google who uses data to monetize for any innovation and provide better service? Companies have to sustain and the only way to be sustainable at that scale as Google is to monetize using the data.
How about we don't allow companies to monetize any other way than directly? E.g. by having paying customers for their services?
Killing all ad-supported BS will make the internet so much better.
> So why is it that Google, Microsoft & Yahoo cooperate on schema.org to establish shared vocabulary?
Reduced differentiation between underlying services drives them from product world into commodity world. Lower margins and stronger competition at that level certainly benefit the big players. Services in question, maybe not so much.
> How do you propose they source that data from other browsers?
Easy. Google should not be operating the monopoly search engine _and_ the monopoly web browser. They need to spin off search or Chrome as a separate company. Then they can source their data from wherever they like. Then every browser is an "other browser".
Isn't the point of Google's current valuation that they are stealing as much data as they can to feed their nascent AI in the hopes of spawning the best masses manipulator? Why would they reconsider their overarching business model?
> they have access, and can purchase, the largest and best data sets available
Google might have an advantage in personal data, that can be used for advertising and health, but when it comes to general data, such as image datasets and NLP datasets, they can be found in the public domain and are growing fast. There is just a specific, limited advantage to Google in datasets. Mostly for ads.
Why? Google seems to have a gigantic advantage in data, which is highly valuable.
Why would they give up that advantage, if they spent millions, if not billions, of dollars creating it?
And what would be the incentive to create such data if there's no economic gain from it?
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