Thanks for mentioning this. It's always annoying when stuff like this is taken out of context and reinterpreted by people who don't have intimate knowledge about the topic, resulting in the kind of useless knee-jerk reactions seen in this comment thread.
If you told the average web-using person that whenever they visit google.com Google gets to know which internet provider you use and from which country, possibly even city you come from and which language you speak, they'd probably freak out thinking it was some evil Google scheme to mine data when in fact, all that is simply a byproduct of any reasonable logging or analytics solution that is not special to Google at all.
> ... they'd probably freak out thinking it was some evil Google scheme to mine data when in fact, all that is simply a byproduct of any reasonable logging or analytics solution that is not special to Google at all.
If that's true -- that an objective reasonable observer would think those things -- perhaps that's indicative of analytics being of questionable ethical standing.
After all, they enable the massive centralization of extremely far reaching user data, voluntarily submitted by both applications and websites to centralized data brokers -- such as Google -- who are not only positioned to build enormous commercial profiles of users, but also to (be compelled to) give or sell those profiles to government(s).
Well what it also means is that its not just Facebook who does it. Many other apps you have installed are probably doing this as well without you knowing about it.
If you told the average web-using person that whenever they visit google.com Google gets to know which internet provider you use and from which country, possibly even city you come from and which language you speak, they'd probably freak out thinking it was some evil Google scheme to mine data when in fact, all that is simply a byproduct of any reasonable logging or analytics solution that is not special to Google at all.