Personally, I find it amazing that anyone would even worry about this. I have never read the goggle privacy policy myself and yet I use gmail myself. I just don’t use it to send stuff that I would be all that concerned about.
Um google happens to be a search engine and given the public business model that we already know about, I just assumed that they intended to search my email for some purpose that would help them. Asking it not to would be like asking a kitten to not purr. It just is not going to happen.
Then too, what is this privacy thing that people think they have? Every company collects information on you all the time and not just electronically. For example, I get catalogs in my snail mail for stores in the mall that I have merely used a credit card at. I never gave them my address but they somehow got the data out of my files without my consent.
Yes, google uses cookies and yes, cookies are a very abuseable technology. Most browsers have an option to warn you before accepting a cookie. Turn it on for a few days and see what it going on (it works like a popup). If you do something as simple as read the NYTimes online, you will get a cookie every time you open a new story. The cookie from there will be sent back to anyone in the NYTimes domain.
Also, has everyone heard of Echelon? It is a huge system of signals intelligence operated by most of the English speaking nations of the world. Echelon probably intercepts a few billon communications every day and sifts them through a bank of supercomputers that look for keywords. While it is probably illegal for your own government to spy on you, there is no law to prevent Canada from spying on the US or the US from spying on Canada. Sine both nations are part of the network, they can trade the data backwards and forwards all day long. People who have worked on Echelon have stated publicly that they can monitor phone calls and get warnings when someone says a keyword before the call is even completed. One case that I have heard was featured on 60 minutes and concerned a woman whose kid “bombed” his performance in a school play. Echelon supposedly had humans listening to the call before it was even over.
