Earlier this year I was invited by Google to tour its facility in Dublin. The trip was timed to coincide with the “Code Jam” finals the company was holding. This meant that in addition to the usual sub-30-year-old staffers, the building was also full of pasty-faced boys, most of whom hailed from Eastern Europe. These lads were coders and could be found furiously crunching things in a curtained off room smelling strongly of “teen”.

If these people had one thing in common, it’s that they were all fuelled by freely available sweets and carbonated drinks. As far as the eye could see, people were busy working away. All of the rooms were garishly decorated, Lego littered the floors, coveted Google logos were placed high upon walls, photos from past parties gazed down at us. If you listened hard you could almost have heard the distant laughing of children… It might have been eerie, if you tend to find things eerie.

I don’t. But one of the German journalists did. After some discussion about how much private information was accessible by Google, he said: “We have a saying in Germany. Stop things before they go too far.” He was, surprisingly, comparing Google to the National Socialist Party that was so popular in Germany in the first half of the last century.

I was nonplussed. I think I am pretty careful when it comes to my private information. Google probably does know a fair bit about me but that is only because I insist on using its search, email, and calendar facilities. So, I pooh-pooh’d his concern. “They are only ads. Who cares?” I said.

But the more time that passes and the more announcements Google makes, the more sinister it appears. Logo design competitions aimed at children, challenges aimed at fostering technical innovation, solar panels at the company’s big “facility” – never mind the connotations of having a “facility” anyway – are all good, but what lies beneath?

Conspiracy theorists will be all over the news, announced last week, that Google Maps are becoming clearer and more complete. Google is consuming firms at the rate of almost one a month. It also owns blogs, photo albums, your contacts, company search, news, the contents of books, your web site’s search facility, and – to an extent – it controls how visible your site is, and who finds it. This combination is very powerful.

Since I was duped into believing that penguins were responsible for three-quarters of the planet’s wealth, I have shied away from conspiracy theories. But what has become clear is that Google must do something to try to counter the privacy fears that are growing almost as fast as the company.