Google services combine -> privacy concerns spike. Should you be worried?

Google is an "American multinational Internet and software corporation specialized in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies."¹ One of their search engine locations is at "www.google.com" which ranks number one in the world of estimated percentage of page views.² Google's quarterly revenue is estimated at around 10 billion dollars during the year 2011.³ All in all it is hard to argue that Google does not affect the internet experience of users. Google has had different privacy laws for its numerous services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_services). But this has all changed. You may have noticed when you used Google's search engine starting this past January, a notification at the top of its  different service pages about the upcoming changes related to Google's privacy laws. Well, it is a fact now "It combined more than 60 of 70-plus policies into a new main policy⁴", if you don't like it Google suggested: "...the company said if users didn't like their data being combined across services, they could simply stop using those services".⁴

On one side "The company says the changes make it easier for users to see what information the company has collected about them"⁴, but critics on the other hand say "...the new privacy policy gives Google free rein to parse together a user's personal information to find out what she is interested in, who she talks to, where she goes and, basically, who she is."⁴ 

I am inclined to side with the critics. Google now has the ability to use the data gathered from a user's pattern across its services to find out all about there is to him/her(personal preferences, hobbies, interests, i.e. who they are). If you think it was easy to characterize a user by his usage patterns with the previous privacy laws, now it has become a "walk in the park". One area which I am focused on is that placing advertisements relevant to the user's preferences will surely increase the revenue of Google, now that they have the full picture of any of their users. To support its decision with regards to changing the privacy laws Google stated that "...it has cut down on the Google Terms of Service and made them easier to read"⁴

But at what cost?

1 . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
2.  http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com
3. http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
4. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224820/Google_privacy_change_draws_firestorm_

Extra links:
http://www.theticker.org/mobile/about/2.8220/google-s-new-privacy-policy-is-not-so-private-1.2708120