Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private
Google had a brilliant advertising business with AdWords originally,  where the ads were simply based on the search term and not a bunch of Orwellian surveillance on the person searching.<p>From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best. And per this article, those gains are clearly coming at the expense of user trust and goodwill, something not reflected in click thru rates and RPM.<p>Here's hoping we can get past all this invasive retargeting / surveillance / privacy-invading crap and get back to straightforward contextual ads, like car parts ads on a hot rod website - our world would be better for it, and maybe Google could restore a little of its rapidly fading goodwill.