Google collects own information or not?

[Orianatristana2]

Does Google collects our information?
i will tell you a story
one day, my friend read a book name "Hope"
Few hours later, ads of Lazada appeared they sell this book as well.
Unbelievable

 

[Golfdriver97]

Google is an advertising company. Of course they use the data they collect to bring content that may be relevant to you.

 

[B. Diddy]

"Unbelievable"? Hmm, I think you're in for a shock. Virtually every company does this. Would you rather pay a sizable fee to use all of your Google services? These companies aren't nonprofit charities -- they're providing a service in return for your data, so that they can make money by serving ads to you.

I moved this from the Google User Research forum (intended for discussions on Google's own research studies they conduct with users to improve their services) to the General Help forum.

 

[mrsmumbles]

Last week I found out that my camera watches me! I already knew about them mining my shopping, calls, texts, journal, etc. But I didn't know that the camera was watching me. I was eating a particular snack that I hardly ever have. The next day I was getting ads for that snack lol.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Virtually every company does this.

From clicking on a shopping site to swiping your debit/credit card at the store.

 

[Bonnie53897]

This is particularly important if you ever decide to quit Google and delete your account entirely, but still want a record of your Google Calendar, an archive of the pictures in Google Photos or a copy of everything in Gmail.

 

[Terost]

I leave my GPS off and only use it when needed. I also turn off Google location history and clear it from time to time. When l use a transit app to get the public bus arrival times and schedule, sometimes Google in the background will get my attention and Google Map starts asking me questions about the Walmart store, hotel, eating place, etc. It asks me if parking is free, is it wheelchair accessible,etc? Google Maps would ask me to take a picture of the Family Dollar store for example. When l use Google to research something like a product, later when l read the local news, l would get ads of the product l researched already.
Google has become too powerful and too big. It has trillions of data to sell to other companies.

 

[B. Diddy]

Google does not sell your data to other companies. They use the data to tailor ads to show you, and get revenue from those ads. See this article: https://www.androidcentral.com/does-google-sell-your-data

 

[riyapatel]

Yes, they do.

Here’s the thing you need to understand about Facebook, Twitter, Google, Quora, Stackoverflow, etc. is that they ARE harvesting user data and ARE selling it to advertisers in all likelihood. It’s used to target advertising.

When you don’t pay for a service, YOU are the product. Google harvests insane amounts of information on you. Facebook is the same. Twitter, Quora, etc.

Economics 101: NOTHING is free. It costs money to run services.

 

[B. Diddy]

No, Google does not "sell" your data to advertisers, as I mentioned above. They don't need to, because you could say that Google itself is an ad company They're using your data to target ads that they serve up, for which they get revenue.

But we can go back and forth on this ad infinitum. If you can show proof of this that isn't from an unreliable paranoid source, then I'd be interested to see it. Otherwise, let's not spread FUD on the forums, thanks.

 

[Non_Fiction]

Facebook shared (and still does?) access to users' data with other tech companies, and I dont believe that Google is an exception. According BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582