You're right that it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, but Google's senior leadership has been very stable over time. Pichai was clearly the continuity c

You're right that it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, but Google's senior leadership has been very stable over time. Pichai was clearly the continuity candidate. The things I've named were all bottoms up - Google's leadership has always been quite reactive hence policies like 20% time. But when I joined the whole company was 10k people and only 5k in engineering. Now it's over 100k people. Google does track user data but if you aren't logged in it's anonymous, resets frequently and is a very noisy dataset. That's why they create lots of good incentives to be logged in, like useful products. Facebook isn't suffering at all, it continues to do great. To the extent users get bored of the classical product they move to Instagram which Facebook also owns. There's no evidence of any real change in user behaviour: free is a great price. But most as targeting isn't based on personal data. The core Google cash cow is ads targeted to your current searches. That works even if you're anonymous. The rest is worth doing but not that massive. It's certainly not worth worrying about. Bear in mind the media had for years been claiming Google "sells your personal data to advertisers" which as I'm sure you know is totally misleading (really is just a lie).