What does Google charge you to use its services?

If you're a Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) user, you probably enjoy the relatively high quality of the company's products at t cost of -- zero. How does Google give all this away for free, you ask? It's the same as any other company on the web that features quality products at no cost. The cost is your privacy. You are paying, and paying big.

Do you mind? It's hard to say what kind of personal, financial and psychological profile Google has on millions of its customers, but you can believe that this massive marketing database exists. How Google manages this will be the most important decision in the company's young, decade-old existence, but the question remains: do many of us sell our souls for freebies? Every time you sign up for something free but fill out a complete demographic profile to get it, you're selling out. Google is doing nothing different -- but its scale is so huge that all this data controlled by one entity does cause for concern among the informed consumer inside us all. It should, anyway.

Google, like anyone in business who is savvy, knows that giving away products or services for "free" on the front end is made up for on the back end. In other words, would you rather pay for every single product or service you use and not have any entity know how to market to you -- or would you rather get a good majority of your products and services at no cost but with the attached condition that there are many entities out there that know you better than you know yourself?

More importantly, they know how to push your exact buttons to have you behaving like a robotic consumer or a slot machine junkie? With the U.S. consumer responsible for two-thirds of economic activity (as little as that is at the moment), the harnessing of this kind of power becomes clear. Okay, I'm off to perform a Google search...