I was kind of surprised to see all of the panic about Google's new consolidated privacy policy. In all of the fear and nonsense around it, there are two very big points being overlooked. First, the policy isn't that different from the one they used last week, and second, you can still opt-out of stuff.
Putting all of that scare stuff aside for a moment, let's look at what people do with Google. I suspect a lot of people are like me. They use Google to search, they use Gmail (or Google Apps with your domain name) and they witness advertisements served by Google on a bazillion sites they go to. As you can rightly assume, the combination of these things give Google's machines a pretty good view of what it is that you do on the Internet to some extent. The win for Google is the same win for you: They can serve you targeted advertising.
So which part of that is bad? I'm trying to understand why people fear that. Google will show you a summary of what they know (or infer) about you, and even allow you to opt-out. I'm just not sure why you'd want to. If they can focus advertising shown to me on stuff I care about, like theme parks, Las Vegas hotels and technology stuff, I would very much prefer that over ads for tampons, boner pills and reality TV.
As a content publisher who pays the bills (to an extent) with ads from Google, I would prefer my audience enjoy the same targeted advertising. If I could not subject the audience to ads and still pay for the server, I would, but since I can't, targeted ads makes it less ugly.
Personally, I don't care what some series of bits on a computer somewhere say about my Internet usage habits. If they're not randomly giving that information to governments, I don't care. Internet anonymity has always been a myth in the first place, but even so, Google lets you opt-out. Their Chrome browser even has an incognito mode. In fact, you don't even need to use Google at all... there are plenty of alternatives.
As with many things technology related, the noise about this is just that... noise.
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