Censorship, loss of privacy, same side of the coin. My original point was that Google is the biggest search engine. It has been reported that they know all our Internet habits. If they get into connectivity and they get a large market share they can selectively censor you. If you are for gay rights and they are not they can simply add a few points to your ranking to move you to page 3, 4, 5.... instead of a natural page 1 ranking. They can impact elections. They can hide things that we need to know about while highlighting things that are not of importance. They would have the power to put you out of business if you rely on the Internet for your leads. This becomes more of an issue with newspapers going bankrupt, and the Yellow Book going out of style, while people are turning more to the Internet for their information.
I'm not saying this is happening, however the potential is there.
Our founding Fathers gave us the Bill-of-Rights for a reason. They lived through oppression and did not want it to happen in the "Several States" that is now the USA.
I'm not sure I understand how privacy and censorship can be said to be similar? Censorship is detrimental to knowledge and expression, privacy can actually be used to protect. So far, with the current unwillingness to conform to Australia's censorship, and the similar statements regarding China currently, Google has been very good about not doing what you're saying they can. They have only conformed in China because their government was going to disallow them from doing business there entirely. Google seems to be more about business than ethics, which is a shame, but I think they realize the power they have now also and are trying to do good with it. This will get really dangerous though if Google ever changes leadership.
Privacy is very different to censorship. Americans seem fine with giving away their privacy in a lot of situations if it means greater protection. Ultimately, we can still maintain privacy simply by not connecting something to the internet that we want private, Google can only access data we feed it - although entirely too many people are ignorant to this. It is more like having a conversation with someone that has a very good memory rather than impeding on your rights. Lets also not forget, civilians do not own the servers we access the internet through so it really is a lot like security cameras - Google just doesn't employ people simply to watch the data flowing in. They have a right to know what is going on on their property, and you have the right to choose what you do on it.
We just don't seem ok about all that information being gathered in one source, but as I already stated, that simply makes it less feasible to actually keep track of it all! I am personally much more worried about submitting information to smaller companies that I am quite sure can indeed evaluate everything they encounter.
We need to be exceeding careful going forward, pay close attention to what exactly they might do with our data, but currently (from a perspective of someone for better technology rather than open source for open sources sake) I think Google is still obeying its "Don't be evil" mantra.