> Their profits come from selling your data to others

It is a common misconception that FB and Google sell user data.

E.g. see https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583

"Google has also played a leadership role in creating industry standards for transparency and data protection. More than a dozen privacy employees at Google spoke to WIRED about how they make sense of the paradox of their work, insisting that there’s no internal pressure to compromise privacy protections to make a larger profit." -Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-personal-data-collec...)

Google also sells a plethora of physical products (Pixel devices, Nest devices, etc.) and services (Storage[Drive], YouTube premium, Stadia, Nest, Fibit, etc.).

This would be similar to calling Amazon "just a [book]store or a marketplace", whereas they also have their hands in Cloud Computing, logistics, grocery, iot, etc.

They absolutely sell the multi-feature profile of you from that data, and the data merchants absolutely tie it together then resell it to everyone. In turn, a bank can make or break your ability to buy a home with it. Fintechs helping make credit decisions get that from both, directly and indirectly, and even better when doing a bit of correlation for the bank. Microsoft and Amazon no real help, Apple even less.

Note: Those products by and large all permit and enrich surveillance aggregation of the picture of you, and use with/for third parties/ads. It’s creepy how fast and accurate the multidimensional take has become.

So you're saying that by tracking people we can avoid people buying homes they can't afford and causing a market crash?

Yes, so long as we don’t mind machines also getting that wrong.

...more than humans do currently

> They absolutely sell the multi-feature profile of you from that data

I'd like to learn more. Do you have a source for that?

Not without breaking NDAs. Also not saying you’re in the know, but people in the know start source hunting when truth leaks.

FWIW, I’ve seen you comment on Google email and ads. From what I am aware of, your information on what was/wasn’t and is/isn’t done has been… optimistically colored. I stayed out of it. But you could be less confident in some of these and/or disclose more readily that you are coming with a pro-employer lens while (you say) being far enough from it you might not know for sure.

> Google is a for profit company. On the side the offer products and services. Their profits come from selling your data to others.

Google does not sell the data to others. (In fact, much of Google's profits would remain intact even without any user data. That is the great thing about search ads -- the user tells you exactly what they want. There is no need to guess)

No, but a history of what you’ve previously searched massively improves search results in just a few queries.

Fact is despite all the tracking search results for me and many others are significantly worse than they used to.

YMMW and what matters for me might not matter for everyone and weeding spam might be harder than before but:

Double quotes used to work reliably.

At least that's the claim. I don't think that Google's search results are that much better than Duckduckgo's, at least for queries where I'm not searching for local businesses.

And yet…

s/selling your data to others/selling access to you to others/

By collecting data about you, usually without you being consciously aware of it, they can offer access not just to a name/address but to a "profile". You are being profiled.

You are being aggressively profiled. They have taken steps to profile even when safari etc put in hurdles.