Agreed wholeheartedly. There are things that I want to keep private; those things do not go on the Internet. There are things I don't mind companies knowing. eBay knows my name and address and for a while I had a credit card on file with them (I still do with PayPal). Similarly, I don't particularly mind Google knowing what I search for... any more than I mind the local bakery knowing what goods I like. Nobody complains about a bakery keeping track of sales (Hmm, the elderly seem to like xxx while kids like yyy. Let's sell xxx on Sunday afternoons, and yyy weekday after school hours!) but Google keeping track of search records (People who search xxx often are looking for yyy. Let's use yyy ads on sites that match xxx keywords.) is seen as evil. (And yes, I'm aware that's an oversimplification, but I think the point still rings true.)
I guess you can call it selling my privacy if you want, but I don't know that it's really my privacy if it isn't something I particularly wanted or needed to keep private in the first place.
Most of the collected data was from unprotected networks; they could only get the network name of anything protected. For example, public hotspots that don't use encryption. (Our city has one.)
Given that, a good question is how private should one consider their connection on such networks? Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy when not using any form of encryption, or when using encryption whose key is publicly distributed? I'd have to say no.
Variables don't; constants aren't.