"Google has become 22% better at selling its users habits and personal information to advertisers"
I hate this sentiment. It's silly. Google does not sell any information to anyone. Google just shows people targeted ads.
If you can show a way to infer personal details from the mere fact that someone is shown a particular ad (or particular huge set of ads), then publish your results so Google can figure out how to not leak that information.
Consider, a mobile phone network that sold drone strikes on its users using the privileged information they have on their location. The precise flow of money and information is not that important to the consequence for the end user.
Google targeting is "using information about me to benefit another company for financial gain of Google". It is not silly to call this selling...
Secondly,
> It is not silly to call this selling...
yes it is! When you sell X to someone, at the end of the transaction, they have X! Otherwise it's not selling!
The drone strike is not chosen for emotion but because it shares the targeting concept. If the mobile network didn't know your location, they cannot sell the service. If they do know your location they can. The difference between these two cases is the latter service includes, in some fashion, your location.
Is your location being sold to your enemy? You can argue the terminology but if you look at the consequences, your enemy has attacked you in your secret location because they bought something from the mobile network company.
Google sells clicks on ads. Once a click is bought, the buyers now has eyeballs on their websites. Not the information about the person doing the clicking. So, the information about the person doing the clicking is not sold.
The drone analogy is inapt.
Selling consequences of information in some very real sense includes the information. In your terms, the "benefit from some service", is a targeted ad which is a causal consequence of user information. A derived work if you like. Information isn't just one specific pattern of bits.
The drone analogy vividly demonstrates how selling a consequence, killing someone in a secret location, really does include their location as an intrinsic part of the service sold even if no-one actually hands out the lat/long.
Google does not sell the information. It puts up ads that users may (or may not!) click on. The clicking is the point at which the information transfer occurs, and it is voluntary and transparent. Or as transparent as it can be, anyway - if you are unaware of how the internet works when you click on a link, that does not make Google culpable for presenting said link.
The information Google has about the user is never given to anyone, least of all the ad buyers.