I don't think you need to feel too bad about the information you've shared. For me, the real problem is the way that online companies mine, track and record online behaviour. They can stitch together what may seem like disparate online actions to build a detailed profile of your online habits. If they were not able to do this, then sharing so much information online wouldn't feel so uncomfortable. We could be fairly safe in the knowledge that those disparate actions remained unconnected.
Google in particular has its digital fingerprints all over the web. For example, you visit a site with Google fonts and Google records your IP address, then you go to a site that serves the jQuery library from Google's servers, Google records your IP address again. You visit a site with Google Analytics - another log. Then you sign into GMail. Does Google join up all these actions? We don't really know because Google's vaguely-worded privacy policies don't tell you anything.
This is a company that "designs with data" and has an insatiable appetite to track and record as much online behaviour as it possibly can. They now have an entire OS that could potentially track your every action - even when you print to your desktop printer (because you can't do anything in the OS without being signed into your Google account).
Of course, a lot of people don't find this a problem (including people in the tech community). But many other people simply aren't aware of just how easily their online behaviour can be tracked and recorded.
Google are not evil, but no company, be it Google or Facebook, should be able to track and record such vast quantities of online behaviour without closer and more critical scrutiny. But that scrutiny simply isn't happening, particularly from the tech community who give Google an easy ride on such matters.
What is evil? I don't care for the word, but if anything is evil, isn't it making money off of deceit and manipulation (advertising), and then trying to make even more money off of that by disengenuously giving us "free" stuff so that they can secretly collect ever more information about us so that it can be sold?
Google in particular has its digital fingerprints all over the web. For example, you visit a site with Google fonts and Google records your IP address, then you go to a site that serves the jQuery library from Google's servers, Google records your IP address again. You visit a site with Google Analytics - another log. Then you sign into GMail. Does Google join up all these actions? We don't really know because Google's vaguely-worded privacy policies don't tell you anything.
This is a company that "designs with data" and has an insatiable appetite to track and record as much online behaviour as it possibly can. They now have an entire OS that could potentially track your every action - even when you print to your desktop printer (because you can't do anything in the OS without being signed into your Google account).
Of course, a lot of people don't find this a problem (including people in the tech community). But many other people simply aren't aware of just how easily their online behaviour can be tracked and recorded.
Google are not evil, but no company, be it Google or Facebook, should be able to track and record such vast quantities of online behaviour without closer and more critical scrutiny. But that scrutiny simply isn't happening, particularly from the tech community who give Google an easy ride on such matters.