For me the issue isn't marketing itself. It's that in order to show me personalized ads they need to know a lot about me. They have to compile and store a personal profile that can be stolen or subpoenaed by anyone who is sufficiently capable or powerful.

But I agree that there is a dilemma. The alternative to ad based business models is to make a payment via a credit card, which identifies me even more directly and is subject to even tighter regulation and potential censorship. In the extreme, I have to deal with companies like Apple enforcing their broken moral standards on my phone.

There are no simple solutions to this I'm afraid.

I am quite happy to be served personalized ads from Google and even Facebook. I regularly get ads for services that interest me greatly, like digitalocean, heroku, cloud66, newrelic, edx, codeschool, teamtreehouse. Thanks, personalized ads!

Microsoft and Apple make money by selling actual products. Google makes money by selling you.

Do you really think Microsoft and Apple don't sell "you" too?

They have (admittedly less-successful) advertising businesses that they show no signs of abandoning, they boast about the number of accounts and/or the number of credit cards they have for developers and partners and so on.

To a first approximation "everybody" wants your money and "everybody" sells you. Generalizations don't work. You need to look at the bundles that come with products/ecosystems on a case-by-case basis.

Google isn't selling me. They're selling a service based on information they get from me in exchange for a product they make for me. It's just another form of payment. Every form of payment comes with it's own benefits and drawbacks.

(I didn't downvote you by the way. I never downvote)

Except it's not as simple as "don't use GMail and you're safe" - they have their finger in every pie via their ad system. You can very, very easily opt-out of using MS or Apple products.