It's a rather unique perversion of a "Privacy Policy", as it has been pointed out: normal companies have a Privacy Policy for data you give to them in the course of using their app or site.

Google is now applying their "Privacy Policy" to everything they can possibly get to, anywhere on the Web; in other words, it applies to all the data they intend to take from us, whether we choose to give it up or not.

This is wholly unsurprising, given their track record of privacy before, as well as their cavalier attitude to copyright, scanning, and republication of every book in existence.

Do people expect that their publically posted data (like hackernews posts for example) are not scooped up by a multitude of bots whether or not it’s mentioned in the bots’ privacy policies?

I think there’s a big expectations gap between what people think should happen and what does actually happen.

Just because I post on publicly accessible websites does not mean I’m okay with random companies slurping up the information to use for their own purposes.

Yeah, truthfully, you guys are right. In the end, anything on the public Internet will get slurped up by a lot of shady, janky players. I've seen whole forums get mirrored onto some place in China for God-knows-what reason.

Google is, thankfully, operating in these USA and regulated by US law. And they're being somewhat up-front about their intentions. That's more I can say for 95% of the web crawlers active today.