IdlyOverthink t1_jd3qa8e wrote on March 21, 2023 at 4:52 PM

Reply to comment by Ieris19 in ELI5: Why does Google offer all these free services like Google Docs, Sheets, Drive, Sites, Forms, etc. without any ads on them? How does Google benefit from this and why do they invest so much in creating and maintaining them? by Elena_Edie

I think your point is that "Google likes having [the data in the services OP asks about] because it could mine that data."

Per their own site:

>We never use the content you create and store in apps like Drive, Gmail, and Photos for any ads purposes.

Here's their source for how they don't use it for training an ML model either.

I think I would choose a different example to support your point because it implies too many (false) conditions, and in doing so establishes a non-existent precedent.

>Of course, it wouldn’t even be a good idea to begin with.

This still entertains the premise that they'd try, and I think that's what I'm trying to address. It's not that it's not a good idea, it can't be an idea. Google has made commitments to making this impossible, so worrying about the ethics, whether it's worth the cost, whether it's a worthy source, etc is a distraction from the actual possibilities/answers.

As said by others, Google Drive is a gateway drug into Google's other services. Beacuse of that, it can be private even from Google because Google uses data from those other services to train their models, and provide ads data.

For example, when you're working on a research paper, Google can glean your area of study (adjacent to "your interests), your level of education (and more) from your search keywords, the time you're searching, etc.

IdlyOverthink t1_jd373mj wrote on March 21, 2023 at 2:48 PM

This speculation borders on misinformation. According to Google's privacy policy they have no access to content you've saved in Google drive except where required by law, or with your explicit permission.

I'm not trying to defend a big corporation; it's likely that Google is doing other questionably ethical things, but comments like this which point in patently false directions distract from the actually important transgressions.

This is entirely different from a model being trained on public GitHub code; it's not possible without Google making claims that opens themselves up to litigation. (Companies won't do this... There's no reason to make themselves financially vulnerable like that.)