&gt;why does Google and their advertisers need to know about it I would ask<p>Google is pretty clear about this. The only reason they track you is for advertising, and there isn&#x27;t any evidence of them using the info for anything else. In fact there is a lot of evidence pointing the other way, such as their insistence on encryption data flowing between their datacenters.<p>This is Google we are talking about, not Kazakhstan, China or Russia.