> I had the feeling the car was being lifted up due to the air currents.
Yup. It is a bit similar as in a plane wing: In a wing, there is an airflow below the wing, and another airflow above the wing. The wing is curved so that the air flowing above needs to travel a longer path, therefore it travels faster. Faster travel translates into lower pressure, therefore there is a pressure differential which lifts the wing up.
This is similar for a car, which is curved as well. Only, because the bottom side of the car is relatively close to the ground, there is less airflow which increases the pressure differential upwards.
This aerodynamic feature is also the reason why racing cars have features which cause that the airstream presses them into the ground. Without that, it would be easy to lose control.
Offsetting flights does not work. Of course, it is nice to protect woodland and jungles. But you just can't plant so many trees that it could replace a single, hour-long flight.
When a tree grows, it extracts some CO2 from the atmoaphere and stores it in its biomass. When it dies, this CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. When we use fuel for flying, we release hundreds of kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere (for a short flight of a single person!), which have been stored over the course of hundreds of millions of years. A tiny bit of a tree that you plant today might become fossilized, but even if that happens it will only store an incredibly small amount of the carbon that is consumed.
It is quantitatively completely impossible to undo that by planting trees.
The only solution is, if at all possible, to stop flying, and use other means of transport, like electrical trains and buses. We can't have both mass air transportation and an alive planet.
The argument is more, Google will try this data to its advantage. This may be convenient for you or even sometimes a real advantage, but there will also be situations where they use it in a way which is advantageous for them and a disadvantage for you.
Let's make up an example. Google scans emails with your purchases and their frequency and accumulates a pretty good understanding of your purchasing power and income situation. This can, for example, be used to sell advertising space for ads which are geared towards a specific income strata.
So far so good.
But the data is also in principle open to companies like credit reporting companies. But let's drive it further, your landlord might be interested in the data because it tells him precisely how much he can increase the rent before you move out and rent something cheaper.
A counter-argument which I see often is that companies like Google and FB do not sell personalized data abut people because data is in some way capital for them. But cases like Cambridge Analytica show quite clearly that FB was already exchanging personalized information against data. It is only slightly simplified to say that they are already selling data.
What I find more concerning is that, at least in the UK, gmail seems to include the public IP of the sending device in the "Received" email header. Because I assume that it's possible (not sure if legal in the UK) to buy the mapping from IPs to names / identities, this means that it isn't possible to use an unnamed gmail account in an anonymous way. I guess that most gmail users are not aware of this issue.
Yup. It is a bit similar as in a plane wing: In a wing, there is an airflow below the wing, and another airflow above the wing. The wing is curved so that the air flowing above needs to travel a longer path, therefore it travels faster. Faster travel translates into lower pressure, therefore there is a pressure differential which lifts the wing up.
This is similar for a car, which is curved as well. Only, because the bottom side of the car is relatively close to the ground, there is less airflow which increases the pressure differential upwards.
This aerodynamic feature is also the reason why racing cars have features which cause that the airstream presses them into the ground. Without that, it would be easy to lose control.