WHY GOOGLE IS SUDDENLY OBSESSED WITH YOUR PHOTOS

Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google+ in 2015, now has 500 million monthly active users adding 1.2 billion photos per day.

At the company’s annual I/O developers conference, Google touted Photos as a signature platform getting a bevy of valuable updates. Users will soon be able to automatically share all their uploaded photos with a loved one, or filter which specific photos are auto-shared by date or topic. A new Suggested Sharing feature will use facial recognition to prompt users to send photos of their friends directly to them, similar to Facebook’s Moments app.But the question remains: Why is Google offering such a feature-rich product that doesn’t appear to be readily monetizable, outside of the few print photo books the company plans to sell?

The simplest answer is that the company wants to keep people within its all-encompassing ecosystem. Today’s tech giants now offer to serve as caretakers to our digital lives across a suite of services in exchange for access to our personal information.Even if Google doesn’t make any money directly from something that it offers, it’s still gathering data.What more data could Google possibly need? The search giant has effectively achieved its longstanding goal of “organizing the world’s information,” if you consider only the written word. But even cofounder Larry Page has acknowledged .

Google Photos, especially now that it’s been fine-tuned for sharing, is a back door into the social networking and chat functionalities that Google has been trying and failing to pitch to customers for the last decade. While we allow the company to passively track us through platforms like Chrome and Maps, Google Photos may be the first Google product that persuades people to actively share their personal information with the company and the masse since Gmail.These are powerful breakthroughs that seem likely to accelerate the pace of technological change. But it’s important to remember they are being spearheaded by a company whose primary objective is to sell targeted advertising. 

Once a Google product has gone through enough iterations vacuuming up enough data to feel like a human necessity, it inevitably must also become a money spigot, whether it’s in the form of promoted destinations clogging up Google Maps or your Google Home playing a Beauty and the Beast commercial unprompted.A photo album used to be a photo album. Now it’s a searchable database that is self-aware enough to infer human relationships.

 What will it be tomorrow, and who will pay for it? That’s the question to ask whenever Google or one of its peers shows off a new, too-good-to-be-free product.Sergey Brin says that Google wants to be the third half of your brain. But now think about it: Do you really want the third half of your brain to make a living by showing you ads? I don’t.