You are paranoid. Google contacts is the best and easiest way to keep your contacts. What's better then signing into a brand new phone and pop all that information is there, or if you are on a computer and need to grab a phone number, easy enough with Google.
I do not think anybody is disputing the convenience and overall slick-ness of the Google environment.
I may be a Google fanboy, but I have a lot of confidence in Google and their products, the gave us this wonderful operating system, why would they go and mess it up by selling your contacts information? Doesn't seem like a good strategy for them.
Google's marketing of contacts information was not what I had in mind.
I was thinking more along the lines of somebody taking that information without Google's permission - like the hacking incident a couple of years ago in China.
Also in the back of my mind was a sync gone wrong. That happened to me when "Upgrading" (quotes out of cynicism...) my iPod to OS6. The upgrade process seemed to be designed to encourage people to use Apples Cloud (which seems tb an analog of Google's environment).
Dunno what happened - although my guess was that I fat-fingered some dialog or another - but my contacts got totally hosed. Not one survived.
I had backup, but it was a week out-of-date because iTunes had suddenly decided it did not like my iPod and I fell behind on backups... but it could have gone even more sideways a couple of different ways.
And, of course, Google Maps went away with that "Upgrade" (courtesy of Apple Marketing) and they killed the podcast functionality in the music player - replacing it with a separate Podcast app... Which added absolutely nothing to the user experience and, therefore, made me wonder when the other shoe was going to drop podcast-wise.
In fact, that was the proximate cause of my migration to Android: control over my data and system.
I just spent most of this morning massaging my Galaxy Note's contacts so that all the Groups are populated and now I think I'll just retire the iPod as a Contact Manager.
And yeah, I do see myself as a little paranoid....