If you care about privacy, you really shouldn’t be using a browser that was created by a company that makes its money by learning everything about you and reselling it to the highest bidder.
This isn't a thing that Google does
There's certainly a difference. I'm not sure it's a very big one though.
The latter is an extra problem in a few specific areas:
1. your foremost fear is a bad actor getting your private details (e.g. identity fraud / doxing). These are legitimate fears, but certainly not a primary likelihood in the majority of cases.
2. discrimination based on background checks (jobs/loans/etc.). Also completely legitimate, though background checks tend to be plenty invasive in isolation these days anyway, so I'm not sure how much of a negative impact Google's data would potentially add here.
Other than these specific threats, the two seem exactly equivalent for most reasons people are concerned about privacy.
You're asking me to give counter-examples to examples/explanations you haven't given.
This isn't some gotcha thing, I'm trying to understand these concerns better, because I really don't. I'm not asking for "counter-examples" to anything, I'm just asking for examples. It's not an odd question.
The main reasons people are concerned for privacy, I would say, are around influence and personal autonomy. There are plenty of people (many of them on HN, I've read many comments here to this effect), who want to cede decision-making about their own consumption to service-providers. There is an attractive convenience to this. Privacy advocates are typically not these people, and are concerned not just for their own individual autonomy, but also often motivated by broader societal concerns like those discussed by Pariser (obviously a hot topic right now w.r.t. Trump and Putin), as well as less-political aspects of selective exposure theory around societal trends.
The main problem I see is that corporations cannot be trusted to limit their use of personal data to benign purposes, nor can they be trusted to keep that data safe from people who will abuse it. But there's certainly a significant difference between potentially leaking or abusing data and actively selling it.
How you define benign? let me give you a real example,
A woman got pregnant, she probably did some web searches related to the situation. Then something bad happened, the pregnancy was lost but the woman continued to get ads related to the baby for months(or even more).
There is no button somewhere where you click and all ad networks can clear your history, your data is stored forever and sold or traded.
Both require an auth consent screen with permissions listed, where it may or may not be clear to the user what's being shared.
That's how Google leaks information.
It’s not the highest bidder but it’s still a problematic consequence of concentrating so much data in one place.