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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Assuming Google Analytics tying it all together.

And perhaps spying through Google searches and chrome? I guess Google never spies on you except by proxy via analytics - but then, if they correlate views on YouTube with analytic hits, that's not really true.

Anyway, the above, as well as:

> If that still doesn't make your campaign profitable, there are broader exclusions and bid adjustments you can make based on age, gender, device, location, parental status and household income.

Really stood out to me - if anyone needed further evidence that Google is still an ad company, and that the free services are about driving ad traffic.

It'll be interesting to see how GDPR affects this. I suppose the sad truth is that Google/alphabet has built a ton of cash on the back of user data, and now no-one else will be able to that as this particular form of business becomes illegal.

But Google is big enough to shift into other growth markets like media manipulation/lobbying and defence contracts etc.

Google does use the "anonymous" usage stats from Chrome to inform AdWords. Source: I personally developed on this feature. Response to rebuttal: the tree you're looking at isn't actually what's complied into the Chrome binary.

I currently work at Google, and from what I know and have seen about how we handle privacy internally I'd be really surprised and appalled if that was the case. Mind sending me more details? My nickname @google.com.

Anonymous reporting in Chrome has been one of the leading use cases for differential privacy at Google. See e.g. https://github.com/google/rappor and https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... which specifically mentions the Chrome use case. This seems to indicate the people who work on this do care at least in some amount about privacy.

(Given the fact that you use a throwaway account I'm very much not expecting to see anything else than FUD, but hey, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.)

Fairly obvious that Google uses upstream chromium then adds in all of the proprietary g APIs and anonymous usage statistics after the fact.

Cookies are used and track both the ads you've seen and clicked on. Combine that with on-site analytics tags and you can see the campaign and traffic sources. View-through and click-through conversions are very standard in advertising.

Also yes, Google is an advertising company. I'm not sure when perception around that ever changed? Their biggest new avenue though is their Google Cloud Platform which has the potential in the future to make more than their entire business combined.

>Really stood out to me - if anyone needed further evidence that Google is still an ad company, and that the free services are about driving ad traffic.

97% of their income is through ads. Maps, Docs, email, Google Plus, Youtube, even Search - it all exists only to increase advertisement profits, and to get ever more minable data from the users. If the ads money ever dries up for whatever reason, the entire company goes belly up.

> But Google is big enough to shift into other growth markets like media manipulation/lobbying and defence contracts etc.

They're already the number one single company in lobbying, beating out AT&T and Boeing:

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe...

I imagine DoD would love smarter autonomous drones and tanks. They bought Boston Dynamics awhile back, makers of seriously creepy things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics

They'll do just fine when the ad bubble bursts.

Google sold Boston Dynamics last summer to Softbank. Their next big moneymaker is the Google Cloud Platform which competes with AWS and Azure.

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