Privacy is a big deal to me. I don’t mind Google know a lot about me. It’s fine. It’s Google’s partners know a lot about me and that’s when I have a lot of problems. It’s largely why I’ve moved away from Google with most of the basic searches and have been using Duckduckgo for quite some time now. For more than a year, DDG has been my go-to search engine. And the 10% of the times that I am not satisfied with the search results from DDG, I go to Bing or Google.

Even so, searching on Google is no big deal. However, more and more users have become wary of Google and attacks about how we are Google’s products have started to stick. That is a fair statement.

Perhaps, it’s time for Google to go back the days of people have to pay for services and give people the option of not being tracked. Yes, I’m talking about giving users the option to pay for services, avoid ads, and be tracked only for services like Google Now. If users are willing to pay, give them the privilege to have more control of their personal information.

For instance, Google Now as it is works because Google has access to your calendar, mail, searches, and other apps that may be used. Well, with $100 a year, an user is given control over all that. I might still let Google monitor my searches but deny it access to any content in my Gmail. After all, on the Apple side, even Siri has access to iPhone users’ calendar information. The only difference is what Apple and Google do with that information. Microsoft offers something more in line with Google but not as coherent.

Over time, this would give privacy advocates some peace of mind while users will realize for themselves how important or not giving providing information to Google is for their lives.

So, would Google be willing to charge users $100 a year to give them more control and avoid seeing ads?