A new aspect of Google's spying

I despise Google and many of their practices - but I'm mulling over whether "spying" is a fair characterization here. Was this profile not built from searches that were manually submitted directly to Google? If you have turned off all location features and then attempt to use localized features like weather and local search, should Google just place you at coordinates 0,0? Is the association between your IP and your request history what makes it spying, or is it the existence of persistently-stored request history at all?

As a software engineer I have associated user IDs with their request logs at almost every job I've ever had; a lot of debugging would have been impossible otherwise. Is that unethical? Are user IDs and IP addresses inherently different?

My IP's geolocation according to google gets switched to Hong Kong about once per year. This means google search turns chinese(?). It is not very fun. I use https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip to submit a request to change back to english and it takes a week or two. I've done this almost a dozen times now over a ~decade.

edit: Yikes! It looks like the above form requires a google account now. That's nasty.

It’s more aggressive in guessing your location to comply with local laws. Ironically you may get less spying.

Wild guess: A locale cookie got set when on VPN with a UK IP?

In which case clearing the browser's cookies should reset it.