I am from germany and grew up in the former DDR - however I can clearly see the difference between a government secretly using extensive surveillance to control people and a feature in a service that everyone is free to opt-out of (street view, not facebook photo tags - you should really have to opt-in to the latter). My argument is not about agreeing or disagrreing with street view though. I'm just disappointed with the widespread misinformation that surrounded the whole issue - some people literally assumed that street view would be a live feed into their homes. The media should have done a better job at educating people.

Generally there is a lot of bias against Google over here. This goes as far as publishers and newspapers heavy lobbying for a law that would force Google to pay for indexing content excerpts in Google News. And they almost got away with it. Of course as a publisher you were able to configure how and if Google should index your content (Headline only, headline + excerpt, full content or no indexing at all). However as you can imagine publishers weren't interested in that but preferred Google to pay for referring users to their content. It's insane.

The picture of Google that is painted here doesn't feel fair at all. Of course it's ok to disagree with Google's data collecting behaviour - you're free to use alternative services, there are enough options. But selling targeted ads simply is their business. Think about the alternative: Let's assume Google didn't collect that data - they still need to display ads though. Ads are still ads, but now they are a lot less relevant to you and simply guessing what you might be interested in.