We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history **and now even your family photos** data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.

Tim Cook throws some serious shade about Google Photos.

This is an interesting comparison. Google makes most of its money from targeted advertising, but they’re not an advertising company, or even necessarily a search or services company. Google is an artificial intelligence company. All their marquee products are about taking scraps of digital information and teaching machines how to distill them into meaning, even into decisions. Advertising is just one way Google is applying this knowledge, but not the only way. Interestingly, Google’s most impressive new products—Inbox, Now on Tap, Photos—don’t carry any advertising at all, at least not yet.

Today’s Google and Apple are trying to do the same thing: make computing more personal. Apple is doing it by putting a device on our wrists, Google is doing it by teaching computers to know us better.