[chestnut-tree]

"It pains me to hear intelligent people talk about being "tracked" as something "bad" a priori."

Tracking is bad when you know little to nothing about what is being is tracked about you and how that information is used. While you might get targeted or personalised results as a result of tracking, that is likely just a small outcome of the data collected about you. Who knows what else is being analysed or number-crunched about your online behaviour? If you read Google's privacy policy, the most notable aspect is how little it tells you. Nothing about how your data is aggregated, who sees your data, how long that data is kept for, whether it's anonymised. Is the data collected to "protect Google and our users" (their words) used solely for that purpose? (For example, providing your date-of-birth for age verification and your mobile number for two-factor authentication.) Or is this information also used for tracking and profile-building? These are all reasonable questions to ask any company that tracks you online or asks for your personal information. But Google aren't giving answers. And Google arguably tracks online behaviour more than anyone else.

[jfuhrman]

A big example of the intentionally murky and everchanging privacy policy confusion was in how it applied to student emails in Google Apps for Education:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...