If you were surprised by this
This past summer Google quietly dropped its historic ban on merging Web browsing info with your name.https://t.co/TRgREtYvaO
— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) October 21, 2016
you haven’t been paying attention.
Google is in the business of collecting information about you and selling it to advertisers. That imperative informs just about everything they do. You can think of “Don’t be evil” as a sunny Norman Rockwell painting of a world that probably never existed and certainly doesn’t now.
I long ago switched to DuckDuckGo for my web searching and you’d be wise to do likewise. Likewise, I use Gmail only as a forwarder for technical mailing lists so Google probably knows I’m a geek. I try to limit their knowledge to that.