Google is pushing the boundaries of what people expect from the company, for better or worse. Just  after launching a new personalized search that has drawn criticism from both competitors and users, the company announced that they are revising its privacy policies has touched off another wave of discontent about the implications for users. So is Google’s new omnibus policy another sign it has broken its promise and is becoming more evil by the day? Or is the fuss over the new version, which will allow the search giant to share data among its various services, just a tempest in a privacy teapot?

Google says the new privacy policy will be rolled out in March, but the company wanted to give users a heads up well in advance because “this stuff matters”. The company notes it currently has more than 70 different privacy policies that govern its various services, from YouTube to Gmail to Blogger. Privacy director Alma Whitten says this approach was:At odds with our efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience.

Google says it just wants to make things easier for us.This makes it sound as though Google is tidying up a messy room, and the company clearly wants users to see it as a benevolent gesture. They also say that the driving force behind the unification — the ability for Google to combine information you’ve provided to one of its services with information from other services — is designed solely to provide “a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.” And the official announcement ties it directly to the launch of personalized search, which the blog post says is an example of “the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products.”

That may be how Google sees its personalized search, but others see it as a fundamental breach of Google’s core search mission, since competitors like Twitter and Facebook argue it favors Google’s own social network over others. The search feature could even provide further ammunition for antitrust regulators, who already have the company in their sights.

The storm of criticism over the new personalized search, which appears to break Google’s original promise to users that it would provide “objective” search results, seems to have made many suspicious of any change that Google makes, and some argue that this has caused people to over-react to the new privacy policy. Kashmir Hill at Forbes, for example, points out that the new policy isn’t even a major change from Google’s earlier policy, which also gave the company the right to share your information between different services. The “Internet freak-out” over the policy change is unwarranted, she says.

But the policy issue seems to have highlighted for many a crucial question: Is Google having all of that info about you — including web searches, Google Analytics data from your website, even location information — a good thing? Mat Honan at Gizmodo says Google is clearly straying over the line towards being evil, and others argue the changes mean the company is turning its back on privacy for its own selfish interests. Some privacy advocates say the new policy is “frustrating and a little frightening.”