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by rchmura 3902 days ago
A couple concepts here: Associating data with your account: This is misleading, because the bulk of information about you isn't associated with your account. Rather, it's stored in other silos associated with a non-account identifier (consider this a way to make it easy to serve more targeted ads to people who don't even have a google account). This non-account identified data can be enriched by account data (when there are co-occurrences of account activity along with non-account identifiers).

The policy is vague and misleading because they should write: "We go to great efforts to track everything we possibly can about people's behavior on the web. We've configured algorithms to connect all the dots and make information about you (found in Service A, Service B, ...) useful. So useful that we can determine enough about you to tailor your online experience in order to influence your decisions when it comes to purchases, brand recognition, political leaning, etc." And follow it up with: "We do this even when the influence we have over you may harm your best interests, for the purpose improving ROI for advertisers" (Obviously this line is not conducive to the policy itself, but rather a blunt explanation of the effect of it which people are categorically unaware of)

The policies don't even explain that there is a difference between people seeing your data, and algorithms acting on your data. (Algorithms acting on your data are much more effective than when people do so. But that explanation in this case is lacking - it makes it seems like it's not all connected together, but in reality it is because of how databases work, and how disparate data sets can unique identify a person with enough data)