i don’t want to offend anyone, but some open source/privacy enthusiasts dislike google, but why?? google has made chromium, android, etc and most of the things they do are open source, and not only that, they also support creative commons media or public domain. i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you. i love google personally because of their commitment to open source software.
“Legal” doesn’t immediately mean “moral”. Everything is legal as long as there isn’t a law specifically banning it, and those laws often only get created as a result of someone abusing their legal right to something.
Google collects also way more data than you pointed out, in every avenue possible. Ever solved a captcha? You likely helped Google train their image recognition AI. Got an android smartphone (a brand that previously had committed itself to being open-source and linux based)? Have fun with pre-installed unremovable Google Spyware. You’re forced to create a GMail account to interact with the whole App ecosystem of the market.
Google can remotely (without your consent) download and delete apps on your smartphone, read your personal data (including stuff you have saved on your SD card) and accesses your camera, pictures and GPS-Data regularly.
I just read an article to prepare for writing this comment and feel actually sick now, I wanna jump ship and get an independent OS, screw the AppStore…