Even if Google does say that some app is firewalled, the implied follow up is "...until customers stop caring" or "...until the law allows us to use it". Everything they do is intended to facilitate advertising, even if not yet.
Even if Google does say that some app is firewalled, the implied follow up is "...until customers stop caring" or "...until the law allows us to use it". Everything they do is intended to facilitate advertising, even if not yet.
It's really creepy, even though it's obvious and trivial.
It's also counter productive - I haven't used 4OD for ages precisely because of that creep factor. Even though I knew they were doing it before the ad.
"Anything any company does is in the end goal to make money" is basically this argument. "Anything a university does is to get grants".
You're reducing the agency of people who work there and their personal objectives to nothing. Google has many different projects which aren't just about pushing ads . How are driverless cars selling ads? The cost of Google Fiber largely outweighs the advertising revenue. etc.
In the hypothetical doctor's office with attached coffee bar to which I was responding, we can see how it would be money-making but there's no good reason to assume that there would be a misappropriation of personal data between the two parts of the business. In Google's case it's the opposite: by default everything they do is oriented toward collecting and using data, as personal as possible. Sensible people would assume that if Google hasn't yet used the driverless car to find a way to better target advertising, they've got top minds thinking about how to do it.
If they were to flip a switch and turn Gmail-mined data into a dating site, or something, users would leave en masse. And good luck trying to entice new users with an expectation that their information would be misused.