I'm truly trying and failing not to see this as an opportunity to pay $3/mo to give Google the right to track and record all my web visits.
I'm fully aware that with the ad-based model, multiple companies are tracking my page views as well, including largely Google's DoubleClick, but there are two important distinctions. Paradoxically I feel safer being tracked by an entire ecosystem rather than a single company. And my lack of explicit consent while simply visiting sites limits what they can do with my data - something tells me that this consent will be in the ToS of this product.
There's a reason mozilla switched to yahoo - Google refused to honor do not track and live up to mozilla's privacy standards. This fits into their tracking strategy and they'll also likely get a big cut being the middle-man.
I've lost a lot of respect for google in general, going from innovator to me-too copy-cat in everything from social media (G+) to cloud computing (GCE).
I'm fully aware that with the ad-based model, multiple companies are tracking my page views as well, including largely Google's DoubleClick, but there are two important distinctions. Paradoxically I feel safer being tracked by an entire ecosystem rather than a single company. And my lack of explicit consent while simply visiting sites limits what they can do with my data - something tells me that this consent will be in the ToS of this product.