And, why does Google and Facebook not sell data? It’s not out some altruistic concern. They want to play kingmaker. Tomorrow, if there’s an option to sell data versus stay in business let’s see what they’d do.
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We're not saying they wouldn't sell data if it meant 10x revenue, but it'd have to be 10x revenue sustained for eternity.
As of now, all of that data staying safe in their solos means
(A) they don't lose customers who are fine with advertising but not that data going to some DB that anyone could then inspect (since you know some company would buy it then charge others $x thousands of dollars to dig into users' lives), and
(B) they're the only ones with that data, and thus their advertising business can use it to possibly show more relevant ads. If the competing ad company can just buy Google's user data, they could sell just as well-targeted ads as Google but undercut them by x% margin, thus always winning the ad space on a website.