I don't disagree that personalization is important, I disagree with the methods Google employs to collect that data and then that they also use it against the user on the advertising side. So yeah, Google does well by trampling all over ethics and privacy.

[0]Only 22% of consumers say they are okay with having their information collected indiscriminately by websites to provide a better experience.

Which means by that metric google abuses 88% of it's users unless they go through the means to turn the features off.

Informed consent, access and ownership are all pillars a modern site experience should have when it comes to data collection -- Google fails here and so does DDG in the opposite direction by just never asking which means they can't do any personalization.

The winner here is going to be someone who can provide the better ethical and functional experience. I firmly believe in the next 15 years we will see litigation in the US around data privacy just using California as the canary and Europe recently voted to get even stricter than the GDPR.

[0]https://www.privacymonitor.com/articles/privacy-guide/