How Google Makes Billions Off You—And How To Opt Out

Google is everywhere online,

from Gmail to Maps, YouTube search.

You can't go online without interacting

with Google in some way.

And while pretty much everybody knows

that Google makes money from advertising,

which makes all these services free or mostly free,

you might not know how deep it goes.

For example, in 2024, Google made nearly 75%

of its revenue from advertising alone.

That means $264 billion from ad sales.

Guess what makes those ads so effective?

It's your data, your location data, your search history,

where you go online, what ads you see,

the music you listen to, potentially health information.

All of this is feeding into Google's ad ecosystem.

Today, we're doing a deep dive into how Google makes

its billions off of you.

This is incognito mode.

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So how vast is Google's reach?

Let's start by breaking down

just a few of Google's most popular platforms.

Google Chrome has 67.9%

of the worldwide browser market share.

The next closest is Apple Safari with just over 16%.

YouTube has 122 million daily active users.

Gmail, which is by far the most popular email service

has over 1.8 billion users worldwide.

Android holds over 71% of the global OS market share.

Google Maps has 2 billion monthly users.

In Google search, which is synonymous with searching online,

owns nearly 90% of the search market share.

Although Google does make money

from other things like Google Cloud or selling phones

or services like YouTube TV,

the vast majority of its revenue comes from ads.

None of this is new.

Google started serving ads in October of 2000.

That's around 25 years ago.

If you spend any time online,

you've seen these ads become increasingly targeted.

Using Google's ad tech not only do advertisers know exactly

what you wanna buy,

they know exactly when you're most likely to buy it.

And while Google has added privacy protections

over the years, it's still making profit from your data.

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So what information is Google collecting about you.

To find out, all you have to do is go to your app store

and look under the developer privacy disclosure.

By go to Google,

scroll down to the privacy disclosure.

You can see all the different categories of data

that Google collects about you.

Such as location, contact, info, search history,

browsing history, identifiers,

analytics like purchases, user contacts.

Let's compare Google to Brave,

which makes a privacy centric browser

that competes with Chrome.

According to Brave's privacy disclosure,

it only collects two things, usage data and identifiers,

which is just like your username or account id.

So how is Google collecting this data?

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Well, there's basically two different categories.

There's inputs, which includes things like search history,

your YouTube watch history,

your browsing data when you're using Chrome,

map searches and more.

Then there's passive collection,

and you might not know this is happening.

This is through things like cookies, fingerprinting

and location tracking, which yeah,

Google's collecting the data

when you enter something into maps,

but it's also collecting data in the background.

For example, if you search shoe stores near me,

it has to know your location to know what's near you.

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One of the ways Google passively collects data about you

is through cookies.

Now, you've probably seen cookies somewhere on the web,

maybe everywhere, those little popups

that come up on nearly every website that say,

do you wanna accept these cookies?

Do you wanna accept only necessary cookies?

Reject all cookies.

So what are cookies?

At the most basic cookies are little bits of data

that websites download under your browser

to store little bits of information about your usage.

Google uses all different types of cookies.

Some of these are deemed functionality cookies,

and these are things that just make websites or apps work.

And then there's advertising cookies,

which are the ones you really need to be concerned about.

These can be used to track the performance of ads,

but they're also used to track a bunch of information

about what you do online, what your preferences are,

what you look at on certain webpages,

and where you go all across the internet.

You don't need to be using Chrome

to download Google cookies.

These are persistent across the web,

and unless you're taking steps

to block more invasive cookies,

you're still downloading them to your machine.

Now, Google is not the only company that uses cookies.

Pretty much all of them are.

But because Google

is the world's largest advertising company,

you're likely to run

into its cookies pretty much everywhere you go online.

Now, cookies themselves are not inherently nefarious.

It's just the primary way that companies like Google

have tracked people online, collected their data

and fueled the surveillance economy.

Now, you may have heard that Google planned

to kill third party cookies in Chrome.

This didn't actually happen.

At the end of 2024, Google reversed its decision

and is continuing to allow third party cookies in Chrome.

But the company says it's continuing

to experiment with new ways to serve personalized ads

that it says are less invasive.

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One of those experiments appears

to be what's called fingerprinting.

Fingerprinting is collecting a bunch of data

about your device

when you're using it to connect to the internet.

This data can include

what type of operating system you're using,

what device you're using,

even how fast your battery is draining.

All of this data can be combined

to create a unique ID for you.

Fingerprinting isn't really about your device's data.

It's really that all that data combined

creates a unique profile,

which can then be used to identify you

and serve you personalized advertisements.

Whereas a cookie is downloading all the information

about what you're doing on the internet,

fingerprinting is downloading all the information

about your specific device.

Every iPhone is unique, every computer is unique,

and because you're the primary user of that computer,

those characteristics are tied to you used to create

a unique ID that's then used to serve you personalized ads.

Now, cookies can be deleted,

they can be blocked, but changing the device you use

to access the internet every single time is impossible.

That's why privacy advocates think fingerprinting

is a more nefarious form of tracking than cookies.

In February, 2025,

Google changed its policies about fingerprinting.

It used to ban the practice,

but now it seems to be allowing it.

Really, the details at this moment aren't that clear,

but this may be one of the ways

that Google is getting past cookies

and using other ways to track people online.

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You might think Google is selling your data,

but the company says that's not right.

Unlike data brokers, which actually do sell data directly

to whoever wants to buy it,

Google sells access to audiences.

Using Google's ad platforms,

an advertiser can pick exactly who they wanna advertise to.

Say you're a shoe company that wants to advertise to people

between the ages of 20 and 40,

and people who make between 80,000 and $200,000 a year.

Google's ad platforms allow you to do that.

They do this through a real time bidding process

that puts people into segments or buckets.

These buckets can include

a bunch of different characteristics.

For example, someone who's in tech, is middle age,

makes a certain amount of money,

has a certain amount of kids,

and drives a certain type of car.

Realtime bidding platforms allow advertisers

to use complex algorithms who rapidly bid on advertisements

that then show up all across the web.

Now, Google says all this data is anonymized,

and the company isn't giving advertisers direct access

to your data.

They're just giving them a bunch of details

about who you are based on the data it's collected.

This means they can serve highly personalized ads.

So if your data is all anonymized,

why does any of this matter?

First of all, studies have shown that it's almost trivial

to used anonymized data to identify individuals.

Secondly, you might not want a big company

that's gonna do whatever it's gonna do with your data

having such a wealth of information about you.

This is amplified in the age of AI

with Google rolling out its own generative AI platforms

like Gemini.

Now, Google says it doesn't use any of your private data,

like your emails, what's in your Google Docs

or search history to train its large language models.

Instead, the company says,

it only uses publicly available information,

like articles on the web or posts on social media.

Still, with AI evolving so rapidly,

we don't know how a company

with such a wealth of sensitive information about you

will use that data in the future.

While Google may have certain policies

about how it uses your data now,

there's no law in the U.S. that prevents it from changing

how it's gonna use that data in the future.

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Google's data collection isn't new,

nor is the problems that it's faced for doing so.

For example, Google's face lawsuits and settlements

for misleading people about its location tracking practices.

DC and three other states are suing Google,

claiming the tech company deceived consumers

in order to gain access to their location data.

It also faced a class action lawsuit

for collecting sensitive health information.

There are also various privacy settlements over facial data

the company collected in Google Photos.

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As we've seen,

Google is collecting a massive amount of information

about hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

It's doing so in a variety of ways.

And no matter what you do, it's almost impossible

to avoid Google entirely.

A 2019 Gizmodo investigation

found that even apps like Spotify and Uber,

break when you block access to Google servers,

still there are some steps you can take

to protect your privacy.

You can stop using Chrome

and switch to a more privacy focused option,

like Brave,

try avoiding all of Google's branded apps

such as Maps, Gmail, Chrome, and others.

While it may be hard to find apps that work

as well as Google's do,

there are alternatives that are more privacy focused.

If you do have to use services or apps,

you can change a bunch of different settings

to better protect your privacy,

such as changing your ad settings

to not get personalized ads,

turning off location history,

deleting your search history and browsing histories.

While Google's data collection is happening all the time,

it's never too late to stop creating that data.

You're gonna become irrelevant

to the company very quickly if you stop using its products.

As a rule of thumb, if a product is free,

that probably means you're the product.

So browse safely and stay safe out there.

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