"Google Photos doesn't sell your photos, videos, or personal information to anyone and we don't use your photos and videos for advertising."
Perhaps more importantly, it only mentions the photos and videos themselves in relation to the advertising. Analyzing the photos (as per the demo in TFA) isn’t “advertising,” and neither is building a user profile.
Then later on, when they use that user profile to allow others to advertise to the user—that’s not “using your photos or videos for advertising” either. Nor is it “selling your personal information to anyone,” since what they’re selling is access to you instead of selling specific personal dossiers.
From where I’m sitting, that still seems to leave the door open to Google itself using what it gleans from your photos to build out your profile, use those insights across their whole company, and target ads at you. It also seems to leave the door open to selling “depersonalized” analyses to third parties, not to mention giving free access to whoever it might see fit (research groups, state actors,…), no?
There’s also a big difference between “doesn’t” and “will never.” Once an analysis with value exists, it seems counter to the forces of nature and commerce for it not to find its way out eventually. Just as the consumer DNA-sequencing firms pinky-swore everything was private, then gradually started spreading people’s genomes farther and wider.
This statement is so simple and so general that it covers everything.
Nowhere does it say they stop using your data.
""Google Photos doesn't sell your photos, videos, or personal information..."
This says that they "don't", it very clearly does not say they " won't".
Google seems especially invested in that kind of stunt. Remember their “ad privacy” consent screens for Chrome—which, ridiculously, framed consent to additional tracking as a “privacy” measure? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227; Aug 2023 / 974 points / 557 comments)
If their CEO's congressional testimony on this point isn't considered binding at Google, verbiage on their website certainly isn't.
> To assuage concerns, Google told Congress and the FTC that it would not combine the user data it got from assets in search, e-mail, or GPS maps with information from DoubleClick about which consumers visited which publications. And so, the acquisition was greenlighted. Ten years later, though, Google did not hesitate to break its promise.
https://www.techpolicy.press/how-us-history-and-googles-own-...
The question of how you opt out of that remains.