Privacy mindset: Let's discuss. What's a better strategy to manage trust

[Why8337]

@InternetGhost

I know I have to do research to support this claim, but my understanding is that Google and Meta don’t sell data. They sell access to advertising based on data, but they’re not giving the information away. Much of that information is stuff that doesn’t change frequently, so once you sell it there’s no reason to come back for more. The data is their competitive advantage and they have the ad business to support it. For smaller companies or ones that don’t have this turbo-charge ad business, they do sell data because they don’t have an ad network to add value on top of the data they collect, so the most they can do is just sell it.

I would love to know more about this if you find any articles about it; Google probably doesn’t ‘sell’ data in the sense that we think, they will most likely share data points with companies as you have said. Selling is a buzz word that is used by the media - Google could be selling data, they might not be, we’ll never know with certainty (hence why I have used the word ‘sell’ to cover all bases)

@InternetGhost

Why have duplicates of your data shared between Google and Microsoft for example if you can totally get by with only one of them?

That is correct, but in the sense that @anon93564765 has used it in they are implying that only one company has access to your data, when in fact they will share some of that data with other companies - some of which could be Big Tech.

@InternetGhost

To me, it depends on how advanced your threat model is and how willing you are to be your own IT department

In all cases it will end with this: everyone has a different situation, someone’s solution might not work for some, but it might work for others. It is the same when someone says that X solution is the worst you could do, when it could actually be what is achievable to them. It always depends on the person.