- 4 months ago
You can’t go online without interacting with Google in some way. And while we pretty much all know by now that the tech titan makes money from advertising, you might not know the scale of that revenue (about $264 Billion in 2024, 75% of their total for the year.) What makes Google’s targeted advertising so valuable? You guessed it: your data. So can anyone escape the reach of Google’s data collection behemoth? We take a deep dive into how Google generates astronomical revenue by following you—and how to opt out.
Director: Efrat Kashai
Director of Photography: Mar Alfonso
Editor: Louis Lalire
Host: Andrew Couts
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Camera Operator: Jeremy Harris
Gaffer: Salif Soumahoro
Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino
Production Assistant: Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Director: Efrat Kashai
Director of Photography: Mar Alfonso
Editor: Louis Lalire
Host: Andrew Couts
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Camera Operator: Jeremy Harris
Gaffer: Salif Soumahoro
Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino
Production Assistant: Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00Google is everywhere online, from Gmail to Maps, YouTube, Search.
00:04You can't go online without interacting with Google in some way.
00:07And while pretty much everybody knows that Google makes money from advertising,
00:10which makes all these services free or mostly free,
00:13you might not know how deep it goes.
00:14For example, in 2024, Google made nearly 75% of its revenue from advertising alone.
00:20That means $264 billion from ad sales.
00:23Guess what makes those ads so effective?
00:25It's your data.
00:26Your location data, your search history, where you go online,
00:29what ads you see, the music you listen to, potentially health information.
00:33All of this is feeding into Google's ad ecosystem.
00:36Today, we're doing a deep dive into how Google makes its billions off of you.
00:40This is Incognito Mode.
00:48So, how vast is Google's reach?
00:50Let's start by breaking down just a few of Google's most popular platforms.
00:54Google Chrome has 67.9% of the worldwide browser market share.
00:58The next closest is Apple Safari, with just over 16%.
01:01YouTube has 122 million daily active users.
01:05Gmail, which is by far the most popular email service, has over 1.8 billion users worldwide.
01:10Android holds over 71% of the global OS market share.
01:14Google Maps has 2 billion monthly users.
01:16And Google Search, which is synonymous with searching online, owns nearly 90% of the search market share.
01:22Although Google does make money from other things like Google Cloud, or selling phones, or services like YouTube TV,
01:28the vast majority of its revenue comes from ads.
01:31None of this is new.
01:32Google started serving ads in October of 2000.
01:35That's around 25 years ago.
01:36If you spend any time online, you've seen these ads become increasingly targeted.
01:41Using Google's ad tech, not only do advertisers know exactly what you want to buy,
01:45they know exactly when you're most likely to buy it.
01:47And while Google has added privacy protections over the years, it's still making profit from your data.
01:52So what information is Google collecting about you?
01:57To find out, all you have to do is go to your app store and look under the developer privacy disclosure.
02:02If I go to Google, scroll down to the privacy disclosure,
02:05you can see all the different categories of data that Google collects about you,
02:08such as location, contact info, search history, browsing history, identifiers, analytics like purchases, user contacts.
02:15Let's compare Google to Brave, which makes a privacy-centric browser that competes with Chrome.
02:19According to Brave's privacy disclosure, it only collects two things.
02:23Usage data and identifiers, which is just like your username or account ID.
02:27So how is Google collecting this data?
02:31Well, there's basically two different categories.
02:34There's inputs, which includes things like search history, your YouTube watch history,
02:38your browsing data when you're using Chrome, map searches, and more.
02:41Then there's passive collection, and you might not know this is happening.
02:44This is through things like cookies, fingerprinting, and location tracking,
02:47which, yeah, Google's collecting the data when you enter something into maps,
02:51but it's also collecting data in the background.
02:53For example, if you search shoe stores near me, it has to know your location to know what's near you.
02:59One of the ways Google passively collects data about you is through cookies.
03:02Now, you've probably seen cookies somewhere on the web, maybe everywhere.
03:06Those little pop-ups that come up on nearly every website that say,
03:09do you want to accept these cookies?
03:10Do you want to accept only necessary cookies?
03:12Reject all cookies.
03:13So what are cookies?
03:14At the most basic, cookies are little bits of data that websites download under your browser
03:19to store little bits of information about your usage.
03:21Google uses all different types of cookies.
03:23Some of these are deemed functionality cookies,
03:25and these are things that just make websites or apps work.
03:28And then there's advertising cookies, which are the ones you really need to be concerned about.
03:32These can be used to track the performance of ads,
03:34but they're also used to track a bunch of information about what you do online,
03:37what your preferences are, what you look at on certain web pages,
03:39and where you go all across the internet.
03:41You don't need to be using Chrome to download Google cookies.
03:44These are persistent across the web,
03:45and unless you're taking steps to block more invasive cookies,
03:48you're still downloading them to your machine.
03:50Now, Google is not the only company that uses cookies.
03:53Pretty much all of them are.
03:54But because Google is the world's largest advertising company,
03:57you're likely to run into its cookies pretty much everywhere you go online.
04:00Now, cookies themselves are not inherently nefarious.
04:03It's just the primary way that companies like Google have tracked people online,
04:06collected their data, and fueled the surveillance economy.
04:09Now, you may have heard that Google planned to kill third-party cookies in Chrome.
04:13This didn't actually happen.
04:14At the end of 2024, Google reversed its decision
04:17and is continuing to allow third-party cookies in Chrome.
04:20But the company says it's continuing to experiment with new ways
04:23to serve personalized ads that it says are less invasive.
04:28One of those experiments appears to be what's called fingerprinting.
04:32Fingerprinting is collecting a bunch of data about your device
04:35when you're using it to connect to the internet.
04:37This data can include what type of operating system you're using,
04:40what device you're using, even how fast your battery is draining.
04:43All of this data can be combined to create a unique ID for you.
04:47Fingerprinting isn't really about your device's data.
04:50It's really that all that data combined creates a unique profile,
04:53which can then be used to identify you and serve you personalized advertisements.
04:57Whereas a cookie is downloading all the information
04:59about what you're doing on the internet,
05:00fingerprinting is downloading all the information about your specific device.
05:03Every iPhone is unique. Every computer is unique.
05:07And because you're the primary user of that computer,
05:09those characteristics are tied to you,
05:11used to create a unique ID that's then used to serve you personalized ads.
05:14Now, cookies can be deleted, they can be blocked,
05:17but changing the device you use to access the internet every single time is impossible.
05:22That's why privacy advocates think fingerprinting
05:24is a more nefarious form of tracking than cookies.
05:27In February 2025, Google changed its policies about fingerprinting.
05:31It used to ban the practice, but now it seems to be allowing it.
05:34Really, the details at this moment aren't that clear,
05:37but this may be one of the ways that Google is getting past cookies
05:39and using other ways to track people online.
05:44You might think Google is selling your data,
05:46but the company says that's not right.
05:48Unlike data brokers, which actually do sell data directly to whoever wants to buy it,
05:52Google sells access to audiences.
05:54Using Google's ad platforms, an advertiser can pick exactly who they want to advertise to.
05:59Say you're a shoe company that wants to advertise to people between the ages of 20 and 40,
06:04and people who make between $80,000 and $200,000 a year.
06:07Google's ad platforms allow you to do that.
06:09They do this through a real-time bidding process that puts people into segments or buckets.
06:14These buckets can include a bunch of different characteristics.
06:17For example, someone who's in tech, is middle-aged, makes a certain amount of money,
06:21has a certain amount of kids, and drives a certain type of car.
06:24Real-time bidding platforms allow advertisers to use complex algorithms
06:27who rapidly bid on advertisements that then show up all across the web.
06:31Now, Google says all this data is anonymized,
06:33and the company isn't giving advertisers direct access to your data.
06:36They're just giving them a bunch of details about who you are based on the data it's collected.
06:41This means they can serve highly personalized ads.
06:44So if your data is all anonymized, why does any of this matter?
06:47First of all, studies have shown that it's almost trivial to use anonymized data to identify individuals.
06:52Secondly, you might not want a big company that's going to do whatever it's going to do with your data
06:56having such a wealth of information about you.
06:59This is amplified in the age of AI, with Google rolling out its own generative AI platforms like Gemini.
07:04Now, Google says it doesn't use any of your private data, like your emails,
07:08what's in your Google Docs, or search history to train its large language models.
07:13Instead, the company says it only uses publicly available information,
07:16like articles on the web or posts on social media.
07:18Still, with AI evolving so rapidly, we don't know how a company with such a wealth of sensitive information about you
07:24will use that data in the future.
07:26While Google may have certain policies about how it uses your data now,
07:29there's no law in the U.S. that prevents it from changing how it's going to use that data in the future.
07:37Google's data collection isn't new, nor is the problems that it's faced for doing so.
07:41For example, Google's faced lawsuits and settlements for misleading people about its location tracking practices.
07:46D.C. and three other states are suing Google, claiming the tech company deceived consumers
07:52in order to gain access to their location data.
07:55It also faced a class action lawsuit for collecting sensitive health information.
07:59There are also various privacy settlements over facial data the company collected in Google Photos.
08:06As we've seen, Google is collecting a massive amount of information about hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
08:12It's doing so in a variety of ways, and no matter what you do, it's almost impossible to avoid Google entirely.
08:17A 2019 Gizmodo investigation found that even apps like Spotify and Uber break when you block access to Google's servers.
08:25Still, there are some steps you can take to protect your privacy.
08:28You can stop using Chrome and switch to a more privacy-focused option like Brave.
08:32Try avoiding all of Google's branded apps, such as Maps, Gmail, Chrome, and others.
08:37While it may be hard to find apps that work as well as Google's do,
08:40there are alternatives that are more privacy-focused.
08:42If you do have to use Google's services or apps, you can change a bunch of different settings to better protect your privacy,
08:47such as changing your ad settings to not get personalized ads,
08:51turning off location history, deleting your search history, and browsing histories.
08:55While Google's data collection is happening all the time, it's never too late to stop creating that data.
08:59You're going to become irrelevant to the company very quickly if you stop using its products.
09:03As a rule of thumb, if a product is free, that probably means you're the product.
09:07So browse safely and stay safe out there.
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