The reason I don't have a Google account is that I don't like being profiled and tracked as I go around the Internet and I believe that pay-walls should not be in front of free information.
A Google account is a pay-wall. You pay by providing them with some information about you.
Nobody does, so don't provide identifiable information.
You are always being tracked on the Internet. Get over it. Nobody is interested in you personally, just your aggregate patterns of behavior with millions of others. Your only solution in-line with your personal philosophy is to go off-the-grid and live in a tree house in Borneo. Anything else is just half-assed conspiracy rantings for the purpose of getting attention by drawing an arbitrary, useless, but terribly noticeable line in the sand that requires you to inconveniencing others.
There's a terribly obvious two part solution to your problem (with an optional third)
1) Use your browser's incognito mode/private browsing mode so tracking you becomes hard/impossible
2) Don't provide your real information when creating accounts, they don't need to know your info, so don't provide it. I can count the number of sites I've provided real information to on one hand, and all of them were e-retailers so I can have them ship me something.
3) (Optional) In the event that you are important enough for somebody to bother being interested in your on-line shopping habits, surf behind VPNs then TORs then Proxies. Your experience will suck, but it will be a multi-m/billion dollar national government level effort for somebody to personally identify you that way. It's good enough for the intelligence agencies of the world, it's good enough for you.
"I believe that pay-walls should not be in front of free information."
Agreed with an excruciatingly simple solution.
1) Go here
https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount?service=mail&cont...
and fill it out with whatever information you feel like, it doesn't even have to be your real info (mine isn't), and boom, you've provided nothing of value to Google and you can access an entire universe of information while making your philosophical point that information wants to be free and that you are specifically important enough for anybody to care about what you are doing. You even get a free email address!
Even better share that login with your friends, get lots of people using the same account. Provide so much noise in the tracking logs that it's impossible to tell your specific information anybody else's. And since you'll be doing this all from behind a few VPNs, TOR and various other obfuscation and encryption technologies, you'll be able to finally, at long last, surf safe and read that post on Google groups.
Oh, and BTW Usenet activity is traceable.
Consider the case of clicking a link in an email someone sent me for a joke. My google account thereafter managed to associate me with bestality [1]. Fun eh?
Now ironically, over a year later, I was still getting rather awful targeted Google Ads advertising and SPAM to a supposedly unrelated email account (on Windows Live with no associated Google account). The persistent google cookie from hell dragged that information and my three static IP addresses across multiple sites and managed to basically bombard me with shit.
Something somewhere managed to make the associations and send directed advertising. They had me profiled.
That in my mind is unacceptable, which is why I don't want to sign up for another profiling account.
It's not paranoia or conspiracy crap - it's fact.
Regarding usenet: there's no reliable way to profile people on it due to its architecture.
[1] I accept some responsibility for clicking a link in an email of course.
Fun fact, I used to work an ISP years and years ago as a tech support peon, but I remember a couple cases of police visiting us working child porn cases with subpoenas for a copy of our access logs for dial-in lines and our Usenet server. Both times the suspect was successfully prosecuted because we and the two other usenet servers he used logged activity, so we could demonstrate what posts he had made, when and from which IP.
Many Usenet servers, especially these days, require a user/pass to gain access, which is probably logged (like we did back in the day).
Also, since your profile contains minimal information the weight of your accidental bestiality hit is magnified. So for a lack of other things to show you, they show you ads for local donkey shows. Fill your profile up with more legitimate activity and that will become a rounding error.
Plus, it's associated your IP address, or some other aspect of your profile, not you personally. Which is the thrust of the rest of my response. The activity is associated with your clothes not the person.
Finally, your lack of profilable activity is in and of itself more profilable. "Oh, he's the guy that doesn't want to be profiled." Is more notable than "He's the guy that uses the Internet just like everybody else."
Weird usage patterns are one of the first things network analysts look to establish when tracking people. You for example, would be great to advertise to about security and identity protection products.
If I did something naughty, I'd expect to get caught. This is not about anonymity, but about the assumptions that people draw about you based on unrelated information tracked from multiple sources.
However, I'd rather be an obvious objector than annoyed by donkey porn adverts :)
I don't see ads either (Firefox+Adblock+ghostery+noscript).
Because I understand your reasons, I really hate it when people like the guilty party above choose to pitch in their half-pence without actually knowing why you didn't have one.
Last thought: I work in the ads industry (without really meaning to), and I can say without doubt that your concerns are 100% valid.
That said, you'd have to do a lot more than not have a Google account to avoid being monetized informationally speaking.