If I used Sheets for a budgeting service (Tiller), should I assume whatever financial transactions go into Sheets, Google will pull and sell the data?
(I do my best to limit the information companies can mine from me, but I’m okay with making exceptions for stuff that might be valuable to me.)
Can they physically access it? I mean sure. Do they? Probably not, they say in their privacy policy they do not use the contents of your google drive (which includes sheets/docs/etc) for advertising purposes
Google probably will not outright sell your data but they will likely data mine everything that can be derived from it and present you appropriate ads (for which other companies pay Google). That is their whole business model after all.
Maybe for some AI training? To sell to third parties?
I looked it up, Google says:
Google Docs, Sheets, & Slides doesn’t use your content for advertising
We don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—including Google Docs, Sheets, & Slides—for advertising purposes, period.
Of course there might be some loopholes in that, e.g. what if you don’t store personal content in these app but e.g. business data. Also they say they are not using it for “advertising purposes” but that leaves room for other uses, too.
Yeah, and besides the loopholes that could be used, they certainly would not just sell the data outright, their business model is having data to target ads with – selling it outright would mean they lose the one thing that gets people to buy ads with them
They don’t use your content for advertising, but they could use the content for improving their algorithms for advertising.
What is important is what are they not saying, rather than what they are saying. This is a big company and you really should be wary if they are actually dealing with you in “good faith”.
Their advertising business model is successful enough, lets put it that way.
And Google and other big tech companies would of course never lie in their privacy policies, no siree!
Would it be worth it to create a separate Google account to use the Tiller service? Will that limit the “hit” my personal account takes? Or is that too much trouble because it is what it is at this point?