These days people seem quick to defend Google's ad-tracking "because otherwise how would they make their money?!".
But I think Google only started doing cross-site ad-tracking a few years ago, and it only got serious about it when it "unified" its Privacy Policy 2-3 years ago. That was so they can track a single "persona" across all of its services. It wasn't to give you Google Now (or at least not the main reason).
So maybe we have 5 years at most of seriously intrusive ad-tracking. I think Google was doing pretty well financially before that, too.
I don't mind contextual tracking on the site, so they can show me ads based on what I'm reading on that page then. I don't find that particularly intrusive, although I could see how NSA can use that as well.
However, the part about tracking you everywhere and then combining that "anonymized" (but not really) data to create a "profile" (or dossier, if you will) of you is what's really creepy.
Google is pretty good at security, but pretty bad at privacy, and sometimes the two conflict quite directly, making the first worse for it - see no end-to-end encryption in Hangouts, yet Facebook's Whatsapp (supposedly) has it.
It's a pretty obvious evolution to their core business of advertising.
Step One: Advertise
Step Two: Target advertisement with history on the computer
Step Three: Target advertisement even better with history across several computers
It's a natural progression without any mental gymnastics, and "They were making enough money at Step Two, why would they need to go to Step Three?" seems like a very silly argument to me.
But I think Google only started doing cross-site ad-tracking a few years ago, and it only got serious about it when it "unified" its Privacy Policy 2-3 years ago. That was so they can track a single "persona" across all of its services. It wasn't to give you Google Now (or at least not the main reason).
So maybe we have 5 years at most of seriously intrusive ad-tracking. I think Google was doing pretty well financially before that, too.
I don't mind contextual tracking on the site, so they can show me ads based on what I'm reading on that page then. I don't find that particularly intrusive, although I could see how NSA can use that as well.
However, the part about tracking you everywhere and then combining that "anonymized" (but not really) data to create a "profile" (or dossier, if you will) of you is what's really creepy.
Google is pretty good at security, but pretty bad at privacy, and sometimes the two conflict quite directly, making the first worse for it - see no end-to-end encryption in Hangouts, yet Facebook's Whatsapp (supposedly) has it.