>I was not forced to be a user of Google products Well forced is perhaps a little strong, but it's nearly impossible to avoid giving information to Google if y

>I was not forced to be a user of Google products Well forced is perhaps a little strong, but it's nearly impossible to avoid giving information to Google if you use the internet. Not using the internet is increasingly not a choice available to people in modern society. The argument here about mobile phones applies just as much to the internet in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6707202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6707202 http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec... >Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731414 >Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own results from a research project I did using the Common Crawl[2] corpus estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them. >The real key to tracking is the referrer data. For the vast majority of clicks, you land on a site that has Google Analytics or you've just left one that did. As Google Analytics tracks your referrer, that means they still have your full browsing history if you jump from GA => !GA => GA => !GA => …