I suppose that what I mean is that I’d be willing to pay Google $15/month to not track me in any way if they could figure out a way to convince me that they truly are not tracking me. I would need some real assurances, though, not just “we’re not tracking you, we promise!” I have no idea how they can provide that kind of assurance, though.

I’m not a google shill. I’m just someone who is trying to have a conversation about this. It seems that, right now, the only way to be mostly sure that you’re not being tracked is to use self-hosted services and, even then, you’d need to examine the source code or trust the FOSS community to keep tabs on things.