Counterpoint(s): A lot of the stuff they make is fantastic (and works fantastically) because their analytics help determine what that website ought to display or what you probably meant by that search query.
I get an email from a friend inviting me to a workshop Friday evening. When I open the invite it asks me if I am going. I click "yes" and it adds the event to my calendar. After work on Friday I use Maps to find the quickest way home through rush hour traffic. Since I have typed in my destination and run the mapping app, Google's algorithms can tell when I get home. Later in the evening, my watch buzzes and I see a notification that tells me that I'll need to leave by 7:34pm to make it to the workshop at 8:00pm in the current traffic. I swipe away the notification and get ready to leave. Once I leave, my Nest thermostat switches over to "away" mode since I don't need to run the a/c nearly as cool while I'm away. Thankfully, since it's 94 degrees today, it will use the weather info in my area as well as the indoor thermometer to calculate the most efficient time to start cooling again when I fire up Maps to head back home.
This is a scenario that I run into just about every day. I may not use all of those things every single day but I do on some. Other times it's more basic (calendar reminders or HVAC auto-tweaking for energy efficiency). Either way, none of it works without analysis of the data I choose to feed it during the course of daily life.
And as far as I can tell, they haven't "sold" my data to anyone. What they have done is use it to make educated guesses about where I live and what may be of interest to me. That way when they sell ad space on the Youtube videos I watch later this evening or on the sidebar of a web search, they can sell that ad space to others who will pay more in the knowledge that their ad budget will be more useful than just a guess.
I certainly remember the web before this sort of thing. Ad space was worth even less than it is now since the only way to stand out was to make your banners more annoying and more abundant. It was worse than cable/tv where a quarter (or more) of every hour is filled by advertising. The advertising is almost never relevant to my interests. It's loud and stupid and on top of it, I still have to pay for cable. To complete the analogy, if Google started a cable network, they could charge $15/mo, show only 10 minutes of ads during an hour-long program, and the ads would at least be for things I would conceivably buy much of the time.
There's plenty of down sides to targeted advertising but the selling of access to my eyeballs is not the same thing as selling my data. It may not seem like much but it makes all the difference to me. In one scenario I consent to one company using the info I give them to enable the services I use. In the other, I'm giving consent for a company to sell my actual info to unknown and undisclosed third parties.