I'm not a lawyer, and this is strictly my own guessing, but I think often times these privacy policies exist to prevent being sued for regular app behavior. For example, ability to create derivative works, publish, or distribute content could cover things like transcoding, proxying, caching, and redisplay.

So for example, if you don't claim the right to create derivative works, then transcoding an image, sending it from a different CDN domain, etc could get you in trouble.

Trying to read worst case scenarios by reading between the lines I think amounts to FUD because the policies are authored for the judicial system, not the consumers. Lawyers try to stake out as much leeway as they can. These companies will be judged on what they say they will and will not do and that doesn't just mean the legalese.

For example, if Google Photos says they will not do X or Y with your photos, they will be judged on whether or not they ever do that, whether or not that particular restriction is part of the general blanket policy for all services.

My general opinion is to attack people for actually what they do, not what they could theoretically do. Really, do you think Google Photos is going to people's private photos and use them without permission in promotional materials without permission? You've taken a particular example (a public business listing) and applied it to a case like Photos.

If you link here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

You find this:

"Because of this, after you delete information from our services, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems."

Which seems to suggest that if you delete data, it will eventually be removed, but might linger on in old backup tapes. Now imagine you don't carve out such leeway, and nuisance lawsuits are brought against you because say, you only destroy your oldest backups every N months for practical reasons. Or perhaps an HTTP caching proxy ends up with a non-accessible copy lingering on its disk.

There's two ways you can think about such policies, cynicism or optimism. The cynic can assume the worst, and they want to keep your photos even after you leave, because machine learning algorithms predicted you'd be the best model for a new TV commercial campaign. The optimist will see it as part of providing a reliable, fault tolerant, cloud service, and that the data is actually used for what they say it is: to improve services.

If you want to be cynical and paranoid, at least be consistent. Run your own Cloud servers, don't upload unencrypted data to other people's cloud, that includes Apple, don't trust anyone, because they can always change their mind, management, policies, later.

But if you are willing to trust, then stake your trust on what ills have actually been done or not done. A lot of claims are continually put forward about harm, but IMHO, the only one that really hold any water are the ones that involve the government getting access to your cloud data, and that'll apply equally to all vendors in the jurisdiction, which goes back to the former point about cynicism and paranoia. If you're paranoid enough, you should avoid cloud services altogether.

BTW, Google is blocked in China, Apple isn't. What do you think Apple is doing differently in China that allows their services not to get blocked by the government?