we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.

Since at least October 2005 (!), the company has stated in the “Information you provide” section: “We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.”

kudos to them for being so explicit about that.

Casting events systematically in a non-objective light is the exhibition of bias, and the continual presentation of policies one disagrees with as evidence of “evil” seems to fall under that category.

What is happening is a consolidation of privacy policies across most of the services Google offers. Other companies and services do this already rather than maintain separate documents, agreements, and records across several related sites. This way there is a single privacy policy that applies across Google products. That is a good thing: it’s simpler for users to understand, they don’t have to sign multiple documents, they know that certain things are and aren’t private across multiple services, and now something like removing demographic data from yourself applies universally, not just on one service. Why shouldn’t it be that way?

To be fair, compartmentalizing services is something that some users prefer.