This is totally wrong. Google has over and over and over again collected as much information as possible about users, and then guarded it zealously against oth

This is totally wrong. Google has over and over and over again collected as much information as possible about users, and then guarded it zealously against others (while profiting by exploiting it). This is unequivocally different from collecting information and then giving it to others, which is what will happen as part of this sale. I can't say with confidence that this is the first time that Google has sold personal information to a third party, but I'm not aware of any other cases, and certainly doing so has not been their traditional modus operandi. My experience at Google (not recently) was that Google is/was so zealous about properly siloing and guarding PII that it was at times an obstacle to preventing criminals from defrauding Google for large sums of money. Never mind selling it to third parties, but in some instances teams would require high-level (director-level?) sign-off to let other teams (e.g. anti-fraud) see the information they'd collected. I cannot say if this is typical, but I saw it happen more than once. That is a pretty privacy-focused company. Google is also zealous, though law-abiding, about pushing back on the government demanding information about users. That doesn't mean that the government never wins (so think twice about giving Google information that will get you in trouble with the government), but it's in stark contrast with the "welcome to Room 641A, yeah sure wiretap all our users" attitude of the telcos. Everybody talks like PRISM was the fault of "the tech companies", but that's literally backwards. So, is this sale-of-personal-information an absolute first? As far as I know yes, but maybe not. But it's definitely not business-as-usual for Google.