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There’s a few reasons

1. They gather data about you and use it with their other products to target more ads.
2. They have paid versions of these services (for institutions and individuals) as well, which means they already have to build and maintain them. Adding a more basic, free tier likely costs than a fraction of what they make from paid users.
3. They hope it will entice you to upgrade to the paid versions.
4. They hope to take market share and users away from their competition and even if it costs them money they make it up elsewhere.
5. They want you to use more of their services both because of the reason I mentioned in item 1, but also because it makes it more likely you’ll buy their products like Google Home, Android phones, Chromebooks, etc. because they can more tightly integrate those services in with their devices and offer better experiences.

That was more an example, rather than something they would actually do. Of course there is a million other ways of doing it, but the more control you have over the data, the better you can develop an AI.

I mean, Google’s already mastered AI. People tend to think of natural intelligence (like humans) when they think about the development of AI.

AI is just a learning system. Google recommendations are a complex calculation on everything that you’ve recently interacted with to figure out the thing most likely you’ll want next.

Unless the function is completely static, which I doubt, it would be considered AI, even if it doesn’t attempt to imitate real intelligence. The function is probably given some weights from Google engineers (basically, what results are valuable), and through trial and error, the program is likely learning how to get more clicks. The more data it can process, the more users it has to try with, the faster it can advance.

This is of course pretty simplistic compered to the math behind how this works, but it gets the point across

They don’t actually sell your data to anyone: they sell access to you as a persona to advertise to.

Selling your data would defeat the entire purpose.

My Uni has Google license for every student and teacher. Everything lies on Google Class, Mail, Sheet, Slide, Meet

Interesting I didn't think about that. It also wouldn't be tough for them to just scrape blogs and news sites, sites like Wattpad that host writing. Lots of data out there for the taking. I'm very curious to see how ai evolves from this point out as a consumer product.

All the information it is possible to glean or infer from a file outside its actual contents. Things like:

File type, size, time and frequency of use (importance), the IP address/location of the user and anyone it has been shared with, the language it uses, etc...

Without even a database of all your data, it is possible to look at a large spreadsheet file and make an educated guess whether or not it is an important file whose user is educated, Western (based on language preference) and likely middle-aged (Excel vs. Google Spreadsheet), who is using it for budgeting or database purposes (based on size and frequency of use).

Just read "The Surveillance Economy" and all your questions will be answered.

Google knows more about you that you will ever know. So even in the free version, you are paying with a lot of your personal data.

Say Google wants to develop an AI that writes books right? So they need a lot of text written by humans to train it right? Well, Google Docs is full of that.

Microsoft and OpenAI did the same thing with coding AI’s. They’ve trained GPT3 on GitHub code to get AIs to write code.

Google’s business is advertising after all, so just like they could train an AI to write, imagine how much data they can collect and feed to algorithms about you to target ads that they know will sway you. It’s not necessarily that an employee at Google is reading your emails. Or that the government is spying on you to catch criminals. The issue is more that an algorithm/AI is learning all about you and honing itself to recommend what you will consume, and thus, generate clicks and money for them.

the google analytics algorithms build a library of metadata on your content that tells them things like your income level, what your drive, places you visit, businesses you frequent, subscriptions and memberships you have, ailments you might suffer from, credit level, family size. basically anything it can glean from what you give it.

The data is stored in an “anonymized” state without your actual name or other personally identifiable info, but that’s a bit moot because they can usually identify you but your metadata fingerprint anyway and link it to you at will.

This happened to me a couple of years back too; They're so sneaky with it. I even tried to migrate from Google to iCloud, but that process is soo exhautive, and now I've ended up with both apple and google drive monthly plans :/

Data ? I hardly know her

Data about data. For example, when you make a survey, the actual answers are the data and the information about the person (gender, age, ...) could be considered metadata.

In this case they mean metadata in files. For example, when you take a picture, the actual pixel information is the data and other stuff (location, time the picture was taken, phone model, exposure time, ...) is the metadata.

This is the correct answer. Their business model is massive data aggregation and sale to marketers. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see some of it in marginal ads (especially in Chrome).

Just wanted to add one more layer, and this literally happened to me yesterday. Last yearI signed up for a pro account to get the extra storage. It's relatively inexpensive, maybe $3 a month for 100GB. I decided not to renew yesterday but had 75gb of storage used. When the pro expired I was locked out of all Google suite services, including Gmail, until I got my storage under 15GB. Seeing I needed to send emails out and get work done, I was handcuffed into renewing the pro version. I am now dependent on it, so I gotta pay them.

Kind of. The market is not really there at the consumer level, google known no single person will pay for these features when free options are available. So they make their options free and as good as they can be so we rely on them. This makes the workforce have experience with their tools over others, so when a company needs to use something, they will prefer google services. Only a company needs to scale up, and so they pay for whatever they have to. It is cheaper to pay up whatever google asks than to train your workers on a different toolset every few years.

Data about data. A simple example is with a photo, when it was taken, where it was taken, by what camera etc.

Never met a data I didn’t like

Metadata is the data about the data. For example they might not read the numbers in your spreadsheet, but they know your IP, browser info, and times you are active online.

Data that’s written about the data that the data contains.

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The main reason google does it is to make computing cheaper andmore accessible to the masses.

The vast majority of googles money comes from online advertising. To increase revenue here, they have two options - grow their market share, or increase the size of market.

Google chose the latter - they grow the market by making computing more affordable to everyone. produce free browsers, produce free word processor tools etc. Overall it drives down the price of a new PC, making it more accessible to the masses, and therefore delivering more eyeballs to the web.

It's also why google is such a heavy investor in web technologies - make the internet easier to use and more people will use it.

Premium versions of the products are just a bonus.

More than that - companies are more likely to use software their workers are familiar with. That is why Microsoft discounts "student" software.

It keeps you in their ecosystem, and if you find yourself using it a lot they charge you more for storage. They also make money from corporations using the suite of products for a fee companies will typically either use Gmail, GDrive, docs, slides, sheets, etc or use the Microsoft alternatives.

The more they can normalize their products over Microsoft the better.

I'm sure it adds to their data analytics capabilities but I'm not sure how it could be useful other than for internal reporting on product usage or upselling their own premium features.

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