House lawmakers met with Google Deputy General Counsel Mike Yang and Public Policy Director Pablo Chavez Thursday to discuss new policy that unifies 60 of Google’s services under a single user agreement and grants the company greater license to share user account information between them.

But the closed-door session ended well short of resolution, with at least a few members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that presided over it openly criticizing Google’s explanation for the privacy changes.

“[They] danced around actual details, and instead spoke in generalities, highlighting their efforts to ‘enhance the user experience’,” said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. was equally critical.

“At the end of the day, ultimately, I don’t think that their answers to us were very forthcoming necessarily in what this really means for the safety of our families and our children and ourselves,” Mack said.

To be fair, Yang and Chavez reportedly did provide a thorough walkthrough of Google’s new privacy settings. But that wasn’t quite what the subcommittee was looking for. What lawmakers really want to understand is how easy or difficult it is for users to protect their privacy and control how their personal information is shared across Google’s services.

“Consumers want to know if they hit the delete button, that something truly is deleted,” said Bono Mack. “The concern is that if I’m logged into Gmail and then forget to log out when I then go to search for information about cervical cancer, my data can then be transported to YouTube. Does that mean my health information is at risk?”

A fair question, and evidently one that’s going to take a few more hearings to get an answer to.

The concerns were expressed in a letter released Thursday by Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas) and Rep. Edward Markey (D., Mass) after the lawmakers asked the four main U.S. wireless carriers to explain their policies for collecting and storing location data.

The carriers–AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA–said they seek subscribers’ consent before tracking their location, but said they can’t control how applications developed by third parties use location information that the carriers don’t provide.

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The operators, including Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) and AOL Inc. (AOL), say they are improving disclosures about online tracking and offering users more ways to protect their privacy. But they say that eliminating tracking is technically difficult and economically impractical, because the targeted advertisements supported by tracking allow the operators to offer free content.

“It is technically impossible for Yahoo! to be aware of all software or files that may be installed on a user’s computer when they visit our site,” Anne Toth, Yahoo’s vice president of global policy and head of privacy, wrote to U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas).

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The representatives, who co-chair the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, sent letters on Thursday to 15 websites saying they were “troubled by the findings in this report, which suggest that the price of consumers’ daily use of the Internet increasingly is surrender of their personal information.”

The Wall Street Journal’s investigative report, What They Know, found that the top 50 US. websites installed an average of 64 tracking tools on visitors’ computers. Of those files, an average of 44 were installed by outside companies – the rest were installed by the websites themselves. Many of those so-called third party companies are in the business of tracking consumer behavior across the Internet.

In the letters, the lawmakers asked the websites to detail their privacy practices and those of the tracking technologies installed on visitors’ computers by outside companies. The letters also seek information on the types of technologies used for tracking and the types of data collected, and whether the sites are targeting consumers based on health or financial data.

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The U.S. Senate voted unanimously Monday to delay the nation’s transition to all-digital television. Arguing that a major economic crisis might not be the best time for a congressionally-mandated switch, legislators pushed the mandatory conversion date from Feb. 17 to June 12.

But the U.S. House of Representatives didn’t buy that argument. Today, it torpedoed the legislation, saying a delay like the one proposed would confuse consumers and be a burden to wireless companies and public safety agencies waiting to use the spectrum the transition will free up. “In my opinion, we could do nothing worse than to delay this transition date,” said Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the House Commerce Committee. “The bill is a solution looking for a problem that exists mostly in the mind of the Obama administration.”