Unfortunately, Firefox for example does precious little to impede Google. Everything from search to "safebrowsing" to geolocating to their own forums runs throu

Unfortunately, Firefox for example does precious little to impede Google. Everything from search to "safebrowsing" to geolocating to their own forums runs through Google servers. The quote that "Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites" must be a huge underestimate, at least for the top few thousands of websites; it would be surprising if more than 10 of the top 1000 websites did not call some Google server on page load, and most will use 5 or 10 Google services. Here in Canada, it's a very rare government website that does not use Google services (American government sites are actually a little better in this regard). My public library's website (bibliocommons) sends every book I look up to Google. Efforts like deleting browser cookies, while certainly a good policy, are probably futile in light of all the ways that Google can track and identify browsers; ip address, stored data, fingerprinting (see: panopticlick), canvas fingerprinting, identification through network card timing, etc. During the past few years, Google has been making a concerted attempt to make website functionality dependent on interaction with Google services: ampproject, googletagservices and googleapis (e.g. jquery) all freqently break websites when browsers block these Google services. For years now Google has been getting a free pass from governments, the media, and most egregiously, developers, who should know better (nobody else knows what 'HTTP' and 'packet' mean!). This is not to say that Google is evil; they're just a unbelievably huge and powerful corporation that is not accountable to anyone, and knows more about most people in the world than they know about themselves, by most measures, and is rapidly developing technology that will be able to make automated, qualitative judgments of people based on this knowledge.