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by rchmura 3902 days ago
Here's a A summary of some of my previous comments on this: The bulk of information about you isn't associated with your account. (or in some personal way) 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).

There are great efforts made to track everything we possibly can about people's behavior on the web. Algorithms 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. This is done even when the influence we have over you may harm your best interests, for the purpose improving ROI for advertisers.

So the idea of "anonymous" data really isn't that, and the real issue is how that data is used against you. This is true both for an end user, as well as a company using google analytics on their site (losing customers, classifying their marketing sources for advertisers on doubleclick, etc.)