Anonymous ad tracking: "By knowing our likes and dislikes, Facebook, Google and others can offer us ads that we’re more likely to click."
The issue here is the author openly allowed Google to store this information. If you disallow those features, Google will have hardly anything on you. This falls in line with he is easy to social engineer.
Anonymous ad tracking: "Google is in hot water for scanning millions of students’ email messages and allegedly building “surreptitious” profiles to target advertising at them."
Anonymous ad tracking.
"Industry representatives, on the other hand, argued that Google is doing nothing wrong, the company should be applauded for its increased transparency, and that it appears to be making a good-faith effort to navigate tricky technical waters faced by many large technology companies who provide both commercial and educational products and services."
"I think they're within their right to improve their products by using student information," said Brendan Desetti, the director of education policy for the Software & Information Industry Association, a Washington-based trade group.
Anonymous ad tracking.
Anonymous ad tracking.
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The bottom line here is social engineering is incredibly easy as demonstrated by your second citation.
Any service you use can be subjected to privacy concerns if a) you don't read the acceptance policies and b) you don't use common sense.
The only way to stop any mining from any service, including Apple's, is to just not use the service. Otherwise, peruse the settings for those respective services and disable things you don't want Google or Apple to track. Easy, right?