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Gnonthgol t1_jd2pnmd wrote

Reply to comment by Digital-Chupacabra 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

Just a note about them using the data. They might not use the data directly as you say. However it is quite likely that they use the data in some indirect way. In the modern way it would be fed to some sort of AI algorithm, and although this AI might not be allowed to disclose the data directly it can still answer questions based on this data. Maybe not so much to non-paying customers but Google does provide a lot of expensive technologies to companies which might be more liberal with other customers data then you expect.

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