What's interesting to me remembering this is that back then, even that late into Google's life, Google had enough people to actually be pissed off about this and try doing something about it. Google of today? I have the sense that management would just shrug its shoulders and let the violating by any nation-state-backed group that pleases continue.
There's a mutual cynicism here. If Google's users think: "Google will violate my privacy no matter what, there's no point in complaining", then Google's executives will think: "Users will believe we are weak on privacy no matter what, there's no point in protecting user privacy".
To break the cycle, it helps to share concrete evidence of Google misbehaving rather than just presenting it as a fact that everyone knows. You get what you incentivize. If the feeling that Google sucks on privacy isn't linked to specific Google misbehavior whenever it is brought up, Google execs will correctly realize that users will feel the same no matter what decisions they actually make.
As a concrete point for discussion, in the zdnet article it states:
>After the news about NSA snooping first broke over the summer, Google decided it was time to start encrypting its datacenter-to-datacenter communications.
Is there an analogous security story from more recently where Google didn't try to address the problem in a similar way?