Re: Benefits of being informed
Fair enough - many of your points are good ones. And you're correct that you can't let any one organization off the hook just because someone else is being nasty, too.
But my point, well or badly elucidated, stands - namely, that in the scheme of things, Google et. al are not the *biggest and most immediate threat*, and that people spend so much time raging at sleazy net companies that they don't have any breath left for the less-trendy but much more dangerous issues.
It would be easy to think that Google and Facebook are the biggest threats to our freedom, but in the end, they hold no physical power over us. They can't arrest us, they can't jail us, they can't shoot us or force us to stay in a specific area or tell us what God to believe in. Certainly, as you say, companies which collect a ton of personal data can assist the government in performing those actions. But first - they are even then only assisting. Trying to stop the government from controlling you by forcing Google to be more transparent is like trying to stop a schoolyard bully by forcing him to eat right.
And second - why the trendy companies? How much information does your credit card company have? How much does your bank have? Your cell phone company? Your college? Your doctor's office? Those places probably all have more easily-accessible, better-organized, and much more comprehensive (both in size and quality) personal information. It won't help anyone sell you cup-o-soups, but it -will- help them in myriad more meaningful ways.
If you work backwards, and instead of starting from 'Google' and ending up at 'Has a bunch of personal information', start from 'Has a bunch of personal information', you're going to end up in a lot of places that make Google look inconsequential. Who the hell cares whether you clicked on an ad when they can find out that you have a breathing problem, a genetic predisposition toward leukemia, your wife is 3 months pregnant (no guesswork necessary with medical records!), that you owe $5600 on your Visa, that you talk to Norbert Q. Silington, who is known to associate with Muslims, on the phone for 6.3 minutes a week, and have a list of everything you've bought since you stopped using cash, including where you got it and what precise time it was.
This is much worse than anything the tech boys can provide, is closer to government access anyway, and people don't think about it and are used to that information being siphoned off. You want a danger to privacy? Think about your car insurance company perusing your medical records and raising your rates when they find a correlation between obesity, regular donut purchases between 6 and 9am, and rear-end collisions at stop lights.
Google might have a cookie that remembers that you like Ostrich porn, but if someone has your medical records, they can check your ER admittance history and find out if you acted out your impulses.
Concentrating on glamorous and fast-changing web companies is well and good, but ignoring boring-ass-database behemoths is, well, like sticking your head in the sand.