A big change to Google's privacy policy has now taken effect, meaning it's now up to users to decide how much information they want collected by the search engine giant. YNN's Adam Balkin filed the following report.

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When you ask anyone about Google's new privacy policy there seems to be two common responses to the question: A, It scares the heck, or rather the tech out of you, or B, you don't know about the new policy and, frankly, you either don't mind or in this day and age feel there's little you can do to stay even somewhat anonymous.

"Whatever happens, happens. I don't think it's only with Google we can be tracked so it doesn't matter to me," said one

Here's the gist of the change. Google is going to apply one single privacy policy to all its products and services from searches to Gmail to YouTube to your calendar and the list goes on. That way, based on your online activity, it can get a clearer picture of your likes and dislikes to get you more personally relevant search results and advertising.

Jonathan Dube, a former AOL executive who's now a digital media consultant with cyberjournalist.net, says while that may frighten some people, it really shouldn't surprise anyone.

"Google is not capturing much new information. What they're really doing is combining all the information from their various services into one big database that's both good and bad," Dube explains. "They will know what types of things you're searching for, what types of things you're watching on YouTube, what types of things you're reading in your email, what's in your calendar, where you go if you have an Android phone. This is scary to a lot of people but the advantage is it enables them to better target their services for you."

But if the new policy still makes you uneasy there are some steps you can take aside from quitting Google cold turkey that can limit the amount of information gathered on you.

For starters, this information is only kept on you if you're signed in to your Google account, you may think of this as your Gmail account. So, quite simply, before doing anything, make sure you're signed out.

If that's too impractical for you though, go to Google.com/history and you can both erase your search history and hit "pause" to pause Google's collection of that history.

There are a bunch of steps like that you can take through Google - all of which are listed at Google.com/privacy/tools.