Dear God. I can barely handle the news snippets that have started appearing in Google Now, I'm actually really close to disabling the entire thing because of them. I guess this means they're not going away anytime soon.
(Same goes for Google's new-ish "share location" feature of Maps. Want that? Then you'll have to share and record you location for all apps. And you have to hunt into settings to re-disable it EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's a feature! Basically a Trojan horse for Google's "record everything" business need, but less immediately threatening. A Trojan gnat, perhaps.)