Funny, because they never seen to have problems hosting the advertising/surveillance data they collect on me. They never went "sorry we can't track you any more for free, will you type in you card number so we can keep surveilling you?"
Google does that by storing my data, many kinds of my data. You making the distinction between data that "the user knows and understands" versus data that "is obscure to the user but advertisers care about" is a matter of marketing, in that as the former is easier to charge the user for.
My point is that the argument of "you're not paying for storing data X therefore fuck you" is a silly one, because you're also not paying for storing data Y, and neither are the advertisers.
That's like saying you don't pay the restaurant for the chef, you pay the restaurant for the food. It's a level of semantics that rises to being simply disingenuous. It's a restaurant, not a grocery.
You can sell ads without targeting. In fact you can even sell ads without users.
Source: I worked years buying and selling online ads.
You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore. It's certainly not the only thing Google is selling.
Unless you're making the claim that the data storage that Google uses for their data tracking isn't paid for by the targeted ad service? That if Google suddenly couldn't use that data for targeted advertising anymore that they'd still keep it around, or that none of their other services would raise in price?
> You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore.
Wrong again. Google's thing is search ads. Those target keywords, not user data. User data is a side-gig for Google, mostly thru youtube, maps, and gmail.