[tshibley]

I mean from Google's perspective this sorta makes sense. It's a lot safer to turn literally any tracking/storage off than to get people accusing you of violating your user agreement.

[Pigo]

That is a good point, especially when you're dealing with people who are concerned with privacy. Sometimes they can be... uhm.. extremely zealous.. about their privacy. They probably feel they need to default to giving them complete autonomy.

[ForHackernews]

What would happen if a company violated its user agreement? Are those agreements even legally actionable?

Since you don't pay for most Google services, I doubt you could recover any damages.

[halflings]

Legal action is the very large recourse.

They would lose credibility, which would make them lose (a lot of) money indirectly.