Right. And you conveniently avoid any discussion about the difference between 'your account' and 'your userprofile' (the data that google stores about a user).
So you are essentially confirming the thrust of the article, that as far as your privacy is concerned nothing changes.
One day the google equivalent of Mark Klein will leak a bunch of userprofiles, we'll all be shocked at what's inside and then you'll go 'Oh, I knew that all along'.
What will make you believe they aren't part of some type of large NSA cover up feeding your clicks to the government? A personal tour of every rack in every datacenter to inspect logfiles?
Trying to discount official policies or responses as "weasel words" or any type of other hand waving to every response they give sounds more like you are set in your agenda vs. wanting to accept a reasonable response.
> What will make you believe they aren't part of some type of large NSA cover up feeding your clicks to the government?
Where did I say that? Or did you just make that up in a second attempt to make me look like some tin-foil hat type?
>A personal tour of every rack in every datacenter to inspect logfiles?
Again, you're trying to pull this into the ridiculous.
An ironclad privacy policy would do me just fine.
If you're fine with ambiguous statements and finely crafted legalese then that's your choice, for me that's not good enough for a company that has presence on approximately 80% of the web.
My agenda doesn't come in to play, I don't really have one, I just noticed that what google says unofficially and what google does according to its own privacy policy are not necessarily one and the same. As I noted, I still use google, I just would not trust them with anything that I consider to be personal. So my email is not on google servers (even though likely a lot of my email is because they have the other side of the conversation). My google 'docs' (or drive, or whatever) files can be published in the newspaper for all I care.
Google, Facebook and just about every other large company that collects endless realms of data on the users that visit them should be absolutely clear in what is stored on their users, for how long they store it and what you can do to opt out. By law they are required to do so but it seems to me (and you're free to disagree) that google is just paying lipservice to these requirements while leaving itself enormous leeway to do as they please with data concerning their users.
I wasn't born in the 'privacy doesn't matter' age, and to me these sort of things deserve scrutiny because power can easily be abused, and google has in this sense enormous power.
Feel free to choose to be supportive of google and their noble goals, I'm sceptical and don't see much to reassure in the words Matt Cutts used above, if you do feel reassured then good for you.
Official responses are not done on blogs or in support forums, they are done in the one place where it matters, the privacy policy, which is supposed to be the document that governs the relationship between companies and their customers in all matters that concern user data.
What would you want to see in this privacy policy?
Any policy is going to be in legalese because that's how legal documents work, so if that's a deal breaker then I don't think western civilization as a whole will work very well for you. It has to be broad enough that the company can continue to do new things, but narrow enough to mean something. Google's lawyers work really hard doing both, making the language both precise and understandable. Do you have any specific feedback for what it should say instead?
That's a serious question which deserves a serious answer. Let me think about this and I'll get back to you (I see you have your email in your profile). I like your definition and I think I see at least a few points where the current privacy policy does not meet my standard for 'narrow enough to mean something' so I'll concentrate on that.
Matt isn't saying anything to contradict Jacques, other than the pedantic 'it does do something'. But Jacques point that it doesn't do anything to protect your privacy from Google still stands.
So you are essentially confirming the thrust of the article, that as far as your privacy is concerned nothing changes.