Unpopular opinion perhaps, but I believe they use the information I share to enrich my user experience. It seems less about monetization and more about providing customized services.
What am I missing?
Manifestly false. They use your information to target ads. The pages that you've browsed will affect the ads you see on youtube and the paid search results you get. That's right, the paid search results you get are modified not to enrich your experience, but because some advertisers pay more for people with your browsing profile. Does that improve your experience, or does that improve google's advertiser's experience?
My post wasn't meant to dissuade anyone who's happy with being tracked from using google.
I was merely pointing out that the post I was responding to tone of "google is tracking me for my sake" is in most instances based on nothing but faith, and in other cases known counter-examples exist.
This idea that ad targeting is some kind of shady evil is a very recent one and, as far as I can tell, artificially created by the press as part of a proxy fight against Google and Facebook as disintermediators. It doesn't seem based on anything real.
Just to be clear, are you saying that the claim that google and facebook have vast amounts of information about you doesn't seem based on anything real?
But to answer the argument you put in my mouth, I have accounts on both services and use them plenty, so yes, these firms have plenty of data created by me and about me.
But if I didn't, they'd just have a few anonymous ad profiles linked to random cookie IDs. I've seen such profiles. That's not very much.
Well, I would argue that it might not be "evil" but it definitely is "shady". But I suspect that from here this conversation would go into the definitions of words, so there's really no point.