They needn't sell it at all. The important thing is that you're using a browser more often to do things that were traditionally done with native apps.

For using Gmail, Drive and Docs you will have a Google account and you'll be logged in often or all the time. Quite useful for targeting you outside those tools.

they don't sell it, they use it to profile you

From docs and drive? Which stuff?

Everything searchable is indexed. Everything indexed and associated with a user is used to profile that user in order to provide superior search results.

They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime.

And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.

So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive?

Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive

Checking a hash of a document unavoidably necessitates reading the entirety of that document.

What does checking hashes of documents mean? Isn’t stuff either encrypted or not?

This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?

how would they check the HASH of a document for unlawful material?

I think the complaint was they scan your entire doc, for all it's content.

> HASH of a document for unlawful material

This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)