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Google is just a digital Eye-of-Sauron[0] and very difficult to avoid if you do any meaningful surfing of the open web. They have their fingers in many different pies.

There is even small subcultures on the web dedicated to avoiding Google by doing things like running 'degoogled chromium' and blacklisting various Google domains in their /etc/hosts file. Sadly all these mitigations don't work because Google already has a dossier on many people and even if you don't have a Google account, Google keeps tabs on you via fingerprinting or other means and knows who 'you' really are (using simple correlation and heuristics).

Then this raises the issue of: what can be done? I prefer to just be nihilistic about it and accept that Google already has dirt on me, despite my mitigations (I have a bit of history blindly handing over personal data to Google for a number of years). I think young people these days in 2020 have a great opportunity to implement mitigations and are better suited than me to browse privately, since I'm already contaminated by Google. (I still mitigate however, but it's not enough).

[0] https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Eye_of_Sauron




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