My point was to rethink privacy from the perspective of what we as individuals stand to gain by gathering this data. I then asked: who would you trust to gather and store this information, on your behalf? For most people, they wouldn't be able to answer that question — for others, especially technologically privileged individuals / open source libertarians — the answer would be "myself".

Aside from logging in with your username and password, you have few if any opportunities when using apps today to stream your data exhaust into a data vault of your choosing. Rare is the app maker that allows you to export a dump of your data, rarer still is one that openly shares the data it has about you with you.

Curiously, Facebook actually a lot of functionality in this regard through its App Settings page (https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications). Google Takeout (https://www.google.com/settings/takeout) provides a lot of your data for export, but no one seems to have really built any tools for the individual to take advantage of this trove of information for personal benefit.

What I hear you arguing for is the end of user tracking. Indeed, there are plenty of tools that you can outfit yourself with to that end (Tor, Ghostery, Adblock, Do-not-track, Incognito Mode, and many more). But ultimately you as representative of a class of internet consumer are an outlier. There are for more people on the internet and in the world who unknowingly consent to data collection and then have little upside in the collection of that data. It is those people that Google cares the most about as customers (perhaps in addition to advertisers), and those who are most in the dark about "the privacy boogey man" about which you know plenty, but about which they know nothing but confusion and fear.

My question is how we enfranchise those individuals with the choice — either to not be tracked, be tracked by a party of their choosing, or to somehow do it for themselves so that they reap some of the gains of the data capital they are producing.

I can see the value of interrogating your personal analytics. I guess how valuable that is depends on how much activity and content you have invested in these online services. And of course, some companies, as you say, would love for their online services to be your principal digital identity. (Which raises another question: do people want a single digital identity? Or do they prefer multiple, unconnected identities? Or even a single identity that isn't joined up with everthing they do online?)

"My question is how we enfranchise those individuals with the choice..."

A good question and I agree. For me, it's also about giving users the information to understand the implications of making that choice. This is particularly important (in my view) when your personal data is involved. That's one reason why I'm critical of Google. Privacy is important to me and they omit basic and (in my view) essential information about privacy in their privacy policy. This makes the privacy implications of using their services unclear. (And, yes, I realise this all comes down to levels of trust, the interpretation of privacy, the value of the service provided, and how much importance someone ascribes to privacy in the first place.)

Most likely because they prefer the policy to stay at a length that it's feasible to read. Unlike the questions which are answered there, which put upper limits on things, the questions you've listed are ones that would require significantly more detailed answers to have any value, since the answer will often vary across products and circumstances, and there are a lot of Google products (not to mention even more circumstances).

I don't see how telling users how long you retain their data (to take one example) is going to lengthen a privacy policy very much. But even if it does, it's poor practice to omit important privacy information just to keep a privacy policy a certain length. One could argue that the sheer length of a privacy policy is an indication of just how much data a company collects. (The less data they collect, the less they have to say in their privacy policy.)