I'm obviously not a lawyer, but to my knowledge, a privacy policy is a contract that ensures that your data cannot be used in certain ways without your express consent. A future google would have the option to update their privacy policy, but they couldn't use your information unless you opted in to the new policy (which companies often do by saying "if you continue to use this, you opt in").

If I'm looking at the right privacy policy (was searching for the general one which would cover Google Analytics un-logged-in tracking), here's a couple of things that struck me as being fairly open ended. Especially for a company as large as Google (and future Google).

From: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse

"We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services – for example to make it easier to share things with people you know. Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google’s services and the ads delivered by Google."

Also: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#nosharing

"We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like publishers, advertisers or connected sites. For example, we may share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services."

I don't want to get into a "Google's creepy" discussion, as I realize that's a personal choice and a lot of people don't have a problem with it these days.

But I do. And I'd be willing to put my money where my mouth is if that were an option.

> but they couldn't use your information unless you opted in to the new policy (which companies often do by saying "if you continue to use this, you opt in").

Yes. I'm working under the assumption (which may or may not be correct) that an official legal contract (and not just a privacy policy which may be enforceable as a contract depending on locale) would both require more formal acceptance (i.e. typing in your name and the date for a digital signature and a note that it's illegal to sign if you are not that person instead of just a click on a button saying "I accept"), and provide a much easier time for any individual wishing to pursue legal action against an entity that violated it (which should keep most of those violations at bay).

In other words, I see privacy policies as new, unstandardized, not taken very seriously by many companies, and possibly useless in some jurisdictions. That may or may not be accurate, as I have no legal experience.

Then wouldn't the right course of action be to talk to a lawyer and not ask google to charge you for something they already do for free?

Whether they charge you or not is irrelevant to the point I'm making. Whether they make it part of the standard offerings, or charge for it, some people would like some assurance that they have actual legal control over their data and it's harder to subvert than an accidental click, and they have some recourse should that data be abused.

This is not a problem unique to Google. I'm far more worried about Facebook than Google with regard to this.