Google is not always your Friend

I suppose the lesson is don't believe everything you hear, and always maintain a healthy skepticism.

Reminds me of the time a few years ago when a tour bus driver in Europe followed his nav guidance and drove right into a lake, passengers and all. Fortunately no one was injured, and only the bus drowned.

Given the extreme heatwave currently blanketing Europe, many people probably wish they were sitting in a lake.

Relating directly with the thread title:

Source:

It's no secret and a fact that Google has been sued and fined many times for their practices while pursuing their self-interest. Assuming there is no agreed upon absolute objective truth for individuals and corporations, biases and self-interest will continue to influence the worlds of business, politics, morality, and law. But in the browser world, one can choose another browser and avoid using Chrome. Unfortunately, the world can be a very unfriendly place filled with individuals and corporations causing harm as they pursue their self-interests. Though biased itself, where would we be without the contracted upon rule of law? Perhaps--"And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." as Thomas Hobbes suggested.

Indeed the big G as well as the big A have become monstrosities - leviathans to be sure !!

It amuses (amazes ??) me to hear anyone saying 'just google it' - and then to consider just how large is the reach of that particular leviathan.
(Hence the mobs of folks struggling to make sense of the ever-changing field of SEO - hoping for great spills of wealth thereby...)

Uncountable numbers of smartphones - pretty much all with a google search box right on their home screen - and what with the big G controlling the search results returned according to their biases.

Of course Chrome as well as ALL big G controlled things are tracking/spying devices, just as those by the big A are - so, whether it be a site's selling page OR a browser OR a friendly seeming thing that responds to your voice commands, 'they' are informed as to your movements & choices.

Avoiding the Chrome browser is a very good starting point.
There is quite a list of other things which can be done as well - if one prefers not to be endlessly tracked - so many in fact - that it could become an obsessively full time occupation !!

For me, grasping that the internut is an open, public network is enough - thereby the use of the words 'private' along with 'internet' are seen from the start as contradictory, which eases the concerns (a wee bit).

For those truly curious about the insidiousness of web tracking a great place to begin is with the invisible tracking pixels which too few folks are even aware of, for instance=>

On the internut you are NEVER alone !!!

Google analytics is Satan's tool.

Is it conceivable that many people don't mind that Google is tracking what they do?

Yes--it is inconceivable that out of the millions of people who use the Chrome browser billions of times a year there would not be a number of those users who didn't mind being tracked, assuming they are aware of being tracked. The same can be said for other popular browsers.

Part of this situation points to the simple fact that people have come to a point that they basically LIVE from their browsers now.
Adding to that is the unavoidable presence of commerce in everything, and:
That the internut is a wide open network - so the corpies can pretty much do as they please - if not directly, then by way of proxies used with plausible deniability.