I would argue that makes what they're doing ok. I know this is a really unpopular opinion on HN but I think google is actually a really good example of ethical data collection. Sure they scrape up just about everything they can get, but they hold onto it themselves and have repeatedly demonstrated that (unlike facebook etc) they try hard to protect it and won't let an arbitrary 3rd party access it. They just let advertisers target demographics, so long as you don't actually click an ad your data is never accessible to advertisers.

Someone has to pay the devs to make their services, someone has to pay for the server farms (and the electricity to run them), someone has to pay for their open-source efforts, etc. They have to make their money somehow and people have demonstrated over and over again that they're unwilling to pay for services like gmail (remember when hotmail used to charge a monthly fee for email service if you wanted more than like, 500mb or something?)

(I don't and have never worked at google)

There is no such thing as ethical data collection, as long as that data contains personal information about individuals. The very act of collecting data is problematic because, as history has shown us, data troves cannot be protected long-term and that eventually the company and others will abuse that data.

This already happened to Google. Not only they got hacked, but various governments successfully get access to all that data both by asking and by taking.

Fair enough. This is why we have lawyers and subject matter experts (which I am not). I am just expressing a general sentiment. Codifying that into an actionable set of laws and regulations requires much more work.