I’m on and off a computer all day most days and have been a long time but the inter technical workings, software or hardware, of the damn thing I have never have GOT!
I know though that in civil litigation which I’ve been consistently involved in for almost 50 years there’s a phenomena called “document/data” OVERLOAD.
See, over in the corner there are sometimes 50 boxes FULL of files produced by what’s called “discovery”. Guess What? Years go by and the half dozen or so attorneys involved, to say nothing of the clients, have not seen 10% of the documents “hands on” or “eyes on” and NEVER Will. And, the judge, Laugh out REAL LOUD will rarely read more than one sentence without it having been stuck in front of his face and highlighted to the max.
So, when Google has 75 million bits of documents about this or 4 trillion of that, what practical good does it do them?
Intelligence and forecasting. It is what they do and many will pay big bucks for it. The more data they have the more accurate they can be.
See, over in the corner there are sometimes 50 boxes FULL of files produced by what’s called “discovery”. Guess What? Years go by and the half dozen or so attorneys involved, to say nothing of the clients, have not seen 10% of the documents “hands on” or “eyes on” and NEVER Will.
Look at the pretty mother who was killed in Colorado a few months back. Nobody was interested in the boyfriend at all. Nobody knew the boyfriend had another girl on the side. But as soon as the mother went missing and the police cared to look into it. They could track everywhere he went for years back. They could track any other phone that followed him. They could see two phones in a motel spend all night together. They could see everywhere the mother went and every time the other girlfriend spoke to her boyfriend or went anywhere. They could find every purchase, every movement, every text or phone call. And it does not take a room full of lawyers. It takes a data analyst a few hours. Now they can search the security cameras which are everywhere with exact times. And they know he killed her. They know which national park she was dumped in. They just don’t know which coyote cleaned her bones.
Also, Google sells the info to advertisers who don’t care how accurate it is. Advertising is not exact. But they do sell it to people who want to investigate you. So if you said anything on line, the democrats can see it as soon as your name gets their notice.
Most of it isn’t for them directly. Most of it is part of google analytics, which tracks how often ads are viewed, how often there’s click through, how long people stay after they click through. This is all to figure out how much advertisers should pay where they’re advertising. Also used for targeted ads, to get the ads you’re most likely to click through in front of you.
“So, when Google has 75 million bits of documents about this or 4 trillion of that, what practical good does it do them?”
The difference is that unlike paper documents, those electronic bits can be scanned for information very quickly, and Google is very good at that.