Truthfully. I would have no problem with the amount of data google aggregated on me, if I could depend on them not using that data against me, or to manipulate me, or to sell it to someone who would do either of those two.
If someone came up to me and said "I'll give you 5 dollars if you give me the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and personal vulnerabilities of all your friends", agreeing to that would be considered a massive breach of trust and a horrible act. On the web it seems like standard procedure.
I will give you that tracking isn't innately bad, but it is an act of trust, and the question is: do you trust google?
This is too myopic of a question. Do you trust Apple? Do you trust Microsoft? Do you trust ____? There are arbitrarily many of these questions to ask.
What really needs to be asked is: how can we establish levels of trust in companies and services that handle our digital information that approaches the level of trust we have in our direct, inter-personal connections?
Not ratting on your friend is trust established through close social connections. Trusting Google to not sell you out is a level of trust established... how?
>Trusting Google to not sell you out is a level of trust established... how?
It's trust from potential destruction. If Google was obviously using your email contents to sell you out, then people would stop using the service. It's like how people don't want to give out their email address to certain organisations out of fear of spam and phishing.
Google can't exist without that trust, so they're incentivised to act in a trustworthy manner.
Ironically, exactly because of the intense scrutiny they face with every small decision they make, I have a lot more faith in Google's inability to be evil than just about any other player. I certainly can't spend the time to verify that all the other players I might give my data to are honest and well intentioned will always stay that way. But at least with Google I have pretty good faith that others are going to do that for me.
Sometimes I wonder if the critics of Google's privacy realise they may be having the opposite effect they intend in this way ...
If someone came up to me and said "I'll give you 5 dollars if you give me the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and personal vulnerabilities of all your friends", agreeing to that would be considered a massive breach of trust and a horrible act. On the web it seems like standard procedure.
I will give you that tracking isn't innately bad, but it is an act of trust, and the question is: do you trust google?