on one reading, for example, the previous policy limited future changes to 'minor' ones; this is important because honestly., who ever revises their opinion on their use of a site based on their monitoring of a privacy policy? a minute fraction. Now, "and we expect most such changes will be minor" is gone.
Their freedom to hand the data to third parties is now much, much wider (for <processing> not the operation, improvement or development of services).
Search the page for 'sensitive' - this is vital. Look: before, google refused to collect or use it without your consent. Now, it can, without consent; it merely requires consent before sending it to third parties. Sensitive info is defined as 'related to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, political or religious beliefs or sexuality and tied to personal information.'
They also now retain the right to store the content of the SMSses you send.
They no longer bind themselves by promising to store credit card data in encrypted form.
They no longer promise to provide services, like google search, that you do not need to provide personal information to use.
They allow themselves to burrow detail about privacy policies in myriad 'help files' or 'specific notices'.
My point is that unless you or anyone can suggest a rational argument against clarifying this policy's language, I'm just not going to worry about it, and I don't think anyone else should either. "Lawyers can exploit it more easily" doesn't work as a rational argument for me. It seems like almost all privacy violations out there happen well within the constraints of privacy policies, or by accident. There's rarely ambiguity in a policy which gets exploited to enable something unexpected. It seems like a really low-concern area that doesn't deserve the kind of FUD I'm seeing in this thread. Especially in the case of a company like Google that could suffer for reversing its public stance on privacy.
It hardly seems more clear than the old privacy policy. I mean, is it really so high in the agenda of google to worry about people reading four or so words saying that google cares about their privacy!
There are some updates such as calling gadgets third party applications which is really just keeping up with the times.
However, unless they have bored employees with nothing to do but surfing around to see what they can make more customer friendly - this is from a company with one of the poorest customer services - I do not see why would they simply decide for the fun of it to change their privacy policy.
If nothing else, the tone of the new privacy policy is: deal with it. The rest of it we will find out shortly in the next decade.