The issue with the government is that you are tracked by default, on your mobile phone and on your online activity. You cannot opt out.
That hasn't exactly stopped them from holding detainees in Guantanamo with no charges for years, and no hope of release.
If the government gets the wrong idea about you, they may bust your door down and run in with guns drawn, then shoot you because they think you're reaching for a gun.
While I'm concerned about what Google or Facebook will do with my information, the biggest concern (and the one expressed here) is that the government will demand or snoop it from them, and act on it in one of the ways described above.
This statement is factually incorrect. The government is allowed to hold you for however long they want, without trial, as long as they call you "terrorist". www.ndaa2012.us
In the uk and the us at least this is no longer true. I they call you a terrorist (with or without proof) the normal laws don't apply. They are also collecting everything we do and storing it for as long as technically possible, quite soon that will be forever.
Government agencies are the bigger problem at the present moment in time, not corporations.
Or beyond that, there's all the sharing buttons, Google Web Fonts, hosted JavaScript libraries, and the like. If I wanted to prevent Google from being able to track me at all, I would have to avoid the vast majority of the web.
You can apply more and more extensions and filter rules to block this sort of thing. I have a variety enabled; they make it a quite a pain to surf the web, as they wind up breaking a variety of sites by blocking a little too much, and I have to sit there and selectively disable them until I find what allows the site to work.
So, effectively, you cannot opt out of corporate tracking either. If you want to, just like avoiding government surveillance, your best bet is to just disconnect from the net entirely.
I dislike that you get forced to use it to opt-out, but there is little other choice.
Primary has all the privacy-enhancing extensions turned on and tuned, so random browsing will not accrue to me.
When I hit a wall (rarely) and after consideration, decide that I really want to bypass it (even more rare), I create a new profile, do the dirty deed, and then destroy the profile.
Chrome profiles are leaky in confidence-damping ways, and the options for privacy extensions are fewer. Use Firefox.
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout Its been around for a looooong time.
> If you want to, just like avoiding government surveillance, your best bet is to just disconnect from the net entirely.
You can't disconnect from government surveillance, in case you did not get my point earlier. They track your phone calls even if you don't use the net. They have cameras in streets, airports, they can track your spending via credit cards, they can check where you are by locating your mobile phone position, but no company alone can do the exact same thing. The balance of power is clearly in favor of the government for surveillance, and the massive budget of the NSA is a simple proof that they are not kidding.