That's an understandable point of view because if you perceived Google the way many of us do, it would be impossible or at least very difficult for you to work for them without strong emotional struggle.

You see, the point is that we, the users, helped to create a mammoth that has an enormous pile of sometimes very intimate data on almost anyone. This in itself is dangerous, regardless of what they do with this data - whether they share it with advertisers and other third parties, the government, NSA etc. or not. Also, the world changes fast. Owners change, governments change. Who is to blame when things end up badly? We are, because we got lured by free unlimited spam-free mailbox, free browser, cheap phone, free analytics, accurate search engine. We like these so much that we gave up critical thinking for a while. But the society as a whole is slowly waking up, hence articles like these (which is quite lacking on several points BTW.)