That's a lazy and incorrect causal link.
Google goes to great lengths not to sell user data. It's far more valuable if they can hold on to it and use it to continue selling advertising.
It's important to understand the difference. This isn't a great metaphor, but imagine a top university. The professors at said university have accumulated many Nobel prizes. The university uses those Nobel prizes to sell classes to students. Does that mean the university is selling Nobel prizes? Obviously not.
Google uses data to target advertising. That doesn't mean Google's business is selling data.
As an advertiser, Google's ability to target users based on user data is very important to me, so your analogy with Nobel prizes at University misses the mark by a mile.
If Google doesn't let me target users in a region with a specific interest, then I will just go to Facebook.
A university without well-respected and celebrated faculty is similarly "worthless." In fact, the gap in price between community colleges and prestigious universities might even be greater than the gap between targeted ads and non-targeted ads.
> As an advertiser, Google's ability to target users based on user data is very important to me, so your analogy with Nobel prizes at University misses the mark by a mile.
As a student, the prestige of an institution and the prizes it's faculty receive is an important component of choosing to purchase education there.
There's a reason that college admissions brochures love to tout the number of Nobel prizes their faculty have received.
Not even close. As an undergrad you are getting ripped off if you choose a research university. As a student the product you are getting is an education, which has little to do with research quality.
Targeted ads depend entirely on accurate user data, so the analogy is a bit brain dead.
>There's a reason that college admissions brochures love to tout the number of Nobel prizes
Yes, to attract chumps. Anyone who does the minimum amount of research or thinking will quickly discover that nobel prize winners are approximately useless to undergraduate educations. Nobel prizes are the gold plating to the hdmi cables of education.
Calling consumers "chumps" doesn't change the fact of their choices.
Plenty of firms will sell you consumer data if you are looking, but it won't be anything near the granularity of what google collects.
Google is not the "big scary player" in town, Verizon and ATT are.
Just because you aren't looking directly at the data doesn't mean you are getting information as a result of it.