So now that I have time to talk about this, I will share my opinions.
Basically, privacy is an important right that all people should have. There's really no justification or defense for a massive surveillance program and that would be true even if terrorism was actually a significant threat. While government surveillance is a huge problem, what's even more disturbing is how most Americans react to this type of surveillance, be it coming from the government or from large corporations like Microsoft or Google. Most Americans seem to take the attitude that this stuff is OK because they personally have nothing to hide or that only those who are doing something wrong are those who would fear. Most people are more than happy to give up their right to privacy so they can use some software or service that they find immediately convenient. Most people think that those who care about privacy are a bunch of paranoid tinfoil hat wearing nutjobs or criminals, which is absolutely not the case. Most people don't realize that the loss of privacy is a slow process. There's an old proverb. A frog that jump sinto a pot of boiling water instantly jumps out. A frog that jumps into warm water that's slowly being heated stays and gets cooked alive. The American people are in the slowly heated warm water.
I'm going to say a small amount about the nine companies in the second link I posted, their products, and what you can do if you use their products/services.
Web services in general: Use an adblocker on all of your browsers. Ads can contain malicious software and can install it on your computer without your knowledge or consent. Noscript is also a good firefox plugin to have. Also, learn to use Tor. Other services (which I still haven't tried) are i2p and freenet. Use one (or more) of these for your web browsing at home. Note: The part about ads/noscript is from the cybersecurity training I had to do for my job.
Microsoft: Microsoft has had known backdoors in their products (see _NSAKEY). If you use Windows, switch to a different operating system, preferably either a Linux or BSD based OS. If you use MS Office, completely remove it from your system and switch to LibreOffice or something similar. If you use Microsoft Silverlight (you do if you use Netflix), remove it as it is DRM software. DRM software is typically used to enforce copyright laws and the enforcers simply don't give two shits about your privacy. Stop using skydrive.
Yahoo and Google: Stop using their web services. If you go to a school or have a job that uses gmail as their email service, then I guess that's acceptable, but don't use google's web interface. If you have a government job, then I suppose that it would be ok to use google or yahoo from that account (work stuff only) since they will be monitoring you anyways.
Facebook: If you are going to keep an account, learn how to use the privacy settings. Even if you set your profile to be private, always act as if you are posting stuff completely publicly and that anyone can see it, regardless of whether or not they know you.
Paltalk: Never heard of them. I guess I'll stay away from them.
Skype: Uninstall it and find something else for video chat, preferably something open source. I hear that pidgin so good, but I haven't used it.
AOL: Seriously who the hell still uses that crap?
Youtube: Youtube uses Adobe Flash for their videos, although some work with html5. Remove adobe flash from your operating system. Flash can be scripted, and it also can be manipulated to access files on your computer without your knowledge or consent (see my comment about ads for an example). There are ways to watch pretty much any youtube video without having flash on your machine.
Apple: Avoid like the plague. There have been times when Apple has left major security holes in their software open for years despite being well informed about them. They also love to use DRM technology. I mentioned earlier about using BSD operating systems. Mac OS X is the exception to that. If you use that, remove it from your machine and install something else.
Remember, it's up to you to take control of your privacy and it might not be easy. The government doesn't give a crap about it and neither do major corporations.
If you need to use any of the above software/services for a job, then it's probably best to use them on either an OS that is only used for work or use an OS running in a virtual machine for those specific tasks. That's mainly for stuff that requires you to install software on your computer in order for you to use it. For stuff that is exclusively on the internet (no plugins required), it probably doesn't matter as much, but to be safe, see the section in this post about web services.
