I find the outrage rather interesting. Google and Facebook are basically everywhere sniffing as much data as they can. I actually don't mind if another party starts collecting the data as well. Go nuts.
Google is already toying with the idea of creating VPNs for consumers. In the case of the pixel it's legit because they allow you to opt-in to VPNing to google servers on untrusted WIFI connections. The irony is that now google has even more data on you.
Once your VPN exits, you can still get MitMed/injected on non-TLS resources, so what is the VPN really doing for you? The only thing the VPN does is control which party will spy on you.
You can easily avoid facebook by not registering there and blocking requests to their servers from other sites. Similarly with google, though you can't use Chrome and Android in that case.
There is no easy and free way to avoid your ISP spying on you.
Maybe I don't understand DNS well enough, but I assume all the tech sites that recommend everyone change their DNS servers to google's 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 understand that Google is heavily data mining and monetizing every lookup.
And the FCC has never attempted to regulate that level of privacy.
So they don't track personally-identifiable information directly; it's certainly possible you could de-anonymize someone from their dataset, but most of what they do track is on their end (what machine handled the request, how quickly, etc.)
The thing is, let's say Google reneged on their promises and started violating privacy on 8.8.8.8 - would it be up to the FCC to enforce that or the FTC to enforce it as fraudulent behavior?
Very good question. It could be handled similarly to the fiasco of google's street view cars 'hacking' poorly protected wireless routers. They got a pretty serious smack on the wrist for that.
Google is already toying with the idea of creating VPNs for consumers. In the case of the pixel it's legit because they allow you to opt-in to VPNing to google servers on untrusted WIFI connections. The irony is that now google has even more data on you. Once your VPN exits, you can still get MitMed/injected on non-TLS resources, so what is the VPN really doing for you? The only thing the VPN does is control which party will spy on you.
The blind lead the blind I guess.