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Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban On Personally Identifiable Web Tracking (propublica.org)
Fudge Factor 3000 writes: Google has quietly changed its privacy policy to allow it to associate web tracking, which is supposed to remain anonymous, with personally identifiable user data. This completely reneges its promise to keep a wall between ad tracking and personally identifiable user data, further eroding one's anonymity on the internet. Google's priorities are clear. All they care about is monetizing user information to rake in the big dollars from ad revenue. Think twice before you purchase the premium priced Google Pixel. Google is getting added value from you as its product without giving you part of the revenue it is generating through tracking through lower prices. The crossed-out section in its privacy policy, which discusses the separation of information as mentioned above, has been followed with this statement: "Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google's services and the ads delivered by Google." ProPublica reports: "The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer. The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct. The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry's longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous. In recent years, Facebook, offline data brokers and others have increasingly sought to combine their troves of web tracking data with people's real names. But until this summer, Google held the line." You can choose to opt in or out of the personalized ads here.
I knew this day would be coming a long time ago so there's a very elegant solution to this madness.
1) Use a separate IMAP/POP3 client (thunderbird is nice) to fetch your mail from Gmail
2) Make your Firefox clean your session data on exit (cookies, web cache, offline website data - that's enough)
3) Adbock+/Ublock Origin with anti tracking and anti social lists for good measure
This still leaves your IP address unprotected but if you're concerned enough, use a provide which generates random IP addresses or VPN.
Its not like google employees are desperate for a job. It isn't a choice between working for google or putting their family out on the street. Save your compassion for contract janitorial services people that clean the floors at google. The highly paid engineers are going to be fine.