Google knows a bunch of stuff about their customers inherently (because their customers have all their email on Google servers, do Google searches, etc.), so Google customers have already decided they trust Google with that information.
If Google were selling it, they'd be passing it along to other organizations that users haven't explicitly trusted. That'd be bad. But they don't do that -- they use their information to show you things based on what they know, with targeted ads; that might bother you from an aesthetic/anti-capitalist perspective, but isn't an extra concern from a privacy perspective.
(Interesting fun fact: You know who does actively sell your information? Your bank, for just about any big bank.)
(2) Use of Google search does not at all imply that a customer wants all of their searches to be associated with their identity, processed, stored indefinitely, used to build a comprehensive dossier to better target advertising on unrelated pages, or handed over to nation-state spooks who come asking. It’s not at all clear that most customers understand what information they’re handing over or what can be done with it when they use services like search.
[Yes, plenty of other ad networks, analytics companies, social media services, etc. do the same thing, and plenty of other types of companies (e.g. the banks you mention) and government agencies also build permanent profiles of people based on whatever scraps of data they can; this is not only a Google problem. It’s creepy when anyone does it, which is why there should be better regulatory oversight ensuring that customers know what data is collected and how it is used, restricting certain types of data aggregation and customer profiling, and placing limits on how long various types of data can be kept.]
But the implication there is that Google's most privacy-invasive product, by a mile, is Google Analytics, which doesn't really help Cook's case in any meaningful way, because that has nothing to do with the Google services that compete with Apple.
The 'reassurances' provided in Google's Terms of Service don't mean jack shit when they have the power to change the terms in the future to whatever they want.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/google-wants-ability-to-combine-you...!
And why would they do that is the question. Again, since they don't serve google cookies on analytics this would be virtually useless. An IP address isn't much to go on. Even a 5% misidentification rate would lead to horribly polluted data about users very quickly.
That google found those keywords in some poor souls email, and I don't have access to the email, doesn't make it any less the case that google is selling that poor souls info to me.
Edit: New policy. I won't respond to responses when my comment is negative. HN is rife with people who are just down voting anything based on ideology, or in a lot of cases, straight up hatred and bigotry. (IT's not question Google zealots hate Apple, and are irrational in this.) I won't be the queer in your game of smear the queer. I don't care how rational the response is.
I'm not saying you downvoted me, just that I'm done putting effort in when it's the comments are literally rendered unreadable and censored by people who don't care about rational discourse. So why participate?
To my knowledge, Google doesn't tell you where the keyword was found, or even if it was an exact keyword match or something they deemed similar enough to show (but I'm by no means an expert in Adwords).
At some point you just have to accept that when you call a plumber, the plumber going to have a pretty good base to assume you need a plumber, and this is releasing some information to them. Without that, communication would be impossible.
No, you know exactly the criteria Google requests from you when you buy the ad. That's most likely a subset of the criteria Google uses to display the ad (which can include things like the past performance of your ads / of similar ads, in different contexts, for different kinds of users and probably all sorts of stuff I'm not thinking of).
They aren't very similar.