This is incorrect. I have rented a movie from Google. I am their customer in every sense of the word. I cannot get customer service for my rental. Whether something is free or not has almost nothing to do with the service you get unless your account is in the tens of millions of dollars.

You are still more of a product than a customer. Renting a movie vs giving your data. Guess which is more important to google?

If Google were purely in a business of renting movies, it would have give you some customer service. But it isn't in that business, so it won't give you a damn.

Google rarely gives good customer service to any of their customers. Good customer service requires lots of humans, which, in the Google hivemind, "doesn't scale" and is therefore not worth doing.

Not to defend Google, but I have rented a movie once, saw it does only have subtitles in languages I don't understand and was able to speak to a customer support via live text chat and get the refund on the same evening. It's frustrating as hell, though, that I can't tell what subtitle languages are included with the rental...

It was probably worth more to them to know you watched it, than to rent it to you.

You may be grossly overestimating ad prices. A datum is damn near worthless, but data in the aggregate is valuable because of the scale of these companies.

User tracking seems to be far more valuable than ads. I'm currently subcontracting for a specific large media trust. Ad contracts are in total about 6 figure numbers. User tracking, sponsored content and skins (custom stylesheets with a sponsor's branding and tracking) are very substantial 7 or 8 digit contracts.

While it's true his own activity isn't worth much, it's still a piece of a very lucrative pie. There are services already oriented specifically around user tracking.

I guess they're oing by the principle of individual behavior is unpredictable, but mass behavior is.