I'll ask you the same question I ask everyone else who seems to be highly concerned about companies knowing things about them. Why does it bother you?

I use Google for pretty much everything. I'm a Google Apps for Business customer and have been very pleased with the services they provide. Their products work well and the uptime/cost ratio is excellent. I'm assuming their ads are still nonintrusive but honestly I wouldn't know as I use adblockers with rather strict rulesets so I never see any of them.

Do they know a metric crapton about who I am and what I do? Sure. Why should I care about this? How does Google knowing what videos games I play or what books I read matter to me in my day to day activities? So they know I played Skyrim a lot and which bands I listen to. Who cares? Everyone who matters in my life already knows all of that anyway. Why panic because Google knows it too?

http://adblockplus.org/en/

I don't see a single ad on space.com. But yes, the never citing sources thing is annoying.

Some hard drive platters are glass/ceramic rather than aluminium. You don't want to open them up and jab a screwdriver through them unless cleaning up little bits of glass is your idea of a good time. And as I said before, they aren't encrypted due to paranoia so I don't really care what the DoD or NSA do.

I encrypt everything not because I'm paranoid or have anything super secret but because it is easier to dispose of old hard drives. When I replace a drive I simply throw the old one away. I don't have to spend any time wondering if there was anything on there I needed to wipe. I don't have to spend any time worrying about how to wipe a broken drive.

If they really want more users then they should add profile support to Google Apps so the metric crap-ton of people who ALREADY PAY THEM MONEY can use Google+.

That is my problem as well. I pay Google money every month for a business account and yet we are the only group that can't make a profile or use Google+. It is almost like they don't really want to succeed.

Others have posted on what to do with your current problem. Now that you see how annoying it can be may I suggest full hard drive encryption from now on. Then when you want to get rid of the drive you just throw it away.

Maybe you should read the relevant articles first.

So if you use full disk encryption such as truecrypt do you just get a trashed drive?

Please don't bring the SWTOR forum rage to Slashdot. I really don't care what the moderators of a game forum are doing. For all values of game.