Looking-glass world of privacy policies

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a column by David Lazarus about the difficulties in not only understanding some companies' privacy policies, but also knowing which applies as financial companies merge, sell accounts and outsource:

Looking-glass world of privacy policies:

"Companies do so much bed hopping, it's hard to keep track of who's sleeping with whom, much less which firm's privacy policy is in force for consumers at any particular time. "

Lazarus quotes a particularly sketchy policy, which essentially means the company will do everything it can legally do with your info. In the US, that's a lot of stuff:

"We do not disclose any nonpublic, personal information about our introduced customers or introduced former customers to anyone except as permitted by law."

That just wouldn't fly under PIPEDA.