Apple also makes most of it's money by selling phones, not user information...
Google is the advertiser. I'm surprised how often people make this mistake. They don't sell user data to other advertisers. This not only goes against their terms of service, but also makes no business sense. Why would they give up their best signal for targeted ads?
That's not selling user information in the same way that Ford doesn't sell automobile factories.
> They aren't directly selling the data itself
Nor are they indirectly selling the data. No one else gets the data.
> they are selling a service that is an extension of that data.
They are using the data to produce a service that they are selling, in the same way that Ford uses a factory to make a car. No one else gets the data, in the same way that no one else gets the factory from Ford.
> I think the semantics are negligible.
I think there is a substantive difference between transferring data to third parties and over whom neither the person the data describes nor Google exercises control and retaining the data internally and using it to provide a service to third parties. And I think that is a critical difference when it comes to privacy.
I mean, you erase the distinction between a armed security guard (who sells a service which involves a firearm) and an arms dealer (who sells firearms).
If you're implying that advertisers can target an specific user, this is false
1) never sell that data at any time in the future (perhaps if they should suffer a bad year financially), and
2) that they will be able to retain control of that data (no leaks, no employees that abuse access, no attacks from other people interested in the data).
Without these criteria, saying anything about what Google "re4ally does" with their data is a best describing the past and maybe the present. Why does everybody act as if current business plans are some sort of Truth that we can rely on? Plans change, management changes - unless it's in writing on an actual contract, it's just wishful thinking.
Of course, this doesn't matter when talking about Google and their data. We already know they give data to the government because they are part of PRISM[1].
As for advertisers, the scenerios "Google gave customer data to an advertiser" and "Google did the targeting work for the advertiser as a (paid) service" differ only in minor details. The end result is the same. There numerous creative ways the data can be moved by proxy or as a service.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Prism_sl...
The same can be said about other for profit organization. If the times changes and the board changes they can change their behaviour. So, it is only ifs.
> Of course, this doesn't matter when talking about Google and their data. We already know they give data to the government because they are part of PRISM[1].
So is Apple
> As for advertisers, the scenerios "Google gave customer data to an advertiser" and "Google did the targeting work for the advertiser as a (paid) service" differ only in minor details. The end result is the same
Minor details? Yes, NOT giving access to the data to advertisers is just a minor detail /s
Only those for-profit organizations that are keeping personal data for long periods of time. This is not at all universal, and nobody[1] is collecting data on anywhere near the scale that Google is, across such a wide range of data sources. How many other corporations have entire browsing histories (google-analytics), email histories, and phone call and location logs?
Do you deny that the aggregation of this data is a risk, should someone abuse it? Do you think this data is going to ever be deleted? You call this "only ifs", but this is a constant risk as long as the data exists. The numerous leaks of personal information we've heard about in the last ~year prove this risk exists. I suspect that Google will do a better job at securing their valuable data than most organizations, but nobody is perfect.
> So is Apple
Entirely off topic. The fact that there are risks when giving data to other businesses doesn't make the risk of giving data over to Google go away. While it is a common meme recently, appeal-to-popularity is still a fallacy.
> Yes, NOT giving access to the data to advertisers is just a minor detail /s
Advertisers... like Google.
[1] save for a couple other corporations that are in the data-collection business