On Tuesday, the search giant announced that it was placing 60 of its Web services under a unified privacy policy that would allow the company to share data between any of those services. (Google Books, Google Wallet and Google Chrome are excluded due to different regulatory and technical issues.) Any user with a Google account — used to sign in to services such as Gmail, YouTube and personalized search — must agree to the policy. Users who don’t want to have their data shared have the option to close their accounts with Google.

Others saw the decision as a sign that there’s been a shift in the company culture at Google. Danny Sullivan, a technology blogger and expert in search, said that the change is just a logical step in Google’s move toward becoming a Web portal.

“It’s similar to how you sign up for Facebook, rather than individual products within Facebook,” he said.

That change, however, isn’t sitting well with parts of the Web community. Google competitors such as Twitter had already pointed out that Google’s integration of information from its social networking site, Google+, into its search results was a sign that the company was moving away from neutral search. These changes appear to take that shift even further. Search engine blogger Danny Sullivan said that Gizmodo’s Mat Honan took the bull by the horns, churning out a piece Thursday night headlined, “Google’s Broken promise: The End of ‘Don’t Be Evil.’ ”

“Google built its reputation, and its multibillion-dollar business, on the promise of its ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy,” Honan wrote. “And now it’s pulling the stakes out, collapsing it. It gives you a few weeks to pull your data out, using its data-liberation service, but if you want to use Google services, you have to agree to these rules.”

At least one regulatory body, Ireland’s data-protection agency, has said it will be looking into the “implications of the changes now that they are launched to users,” Bloomberg reported. Under sweeping new privacy rules proposed for Europe on Wednesday, the Irish agency would become the EU’s “one-stop shop” on Google privacy regulation because Dublin is the site of the search giant’s European operations.