It doesn't matter, the information is there. He mentions building a profile. While the machines might have built it, there's nothing stopping a real person (forced or otherwise) from browsing those profiles.
First of all, there are lots of things stopping them (systems permissions, checks, organizational rules, etc). All might be circumventable -- but to claim they don't exist is ridiculous.
Secondly, intent matters. Killing a person can be a pure accident, can be manslaughter, can be first degree premeditated murder. You might attempt to dumb it down to "It doesn't matter, the person is dead" -- but that isn't how the US legal system, or the majority of people think.
If the intent of a system is to allow the profiles to be read by people (or shipped to government) that is very different than if the intent it to be exclusively used by software.
"The information is there" on all e-mail providers. There is nothing (short of end-to-end encryption) stopping a real person at any e-mail provider from looking at your email.
The interesting distinction (for me, and I have been a happy GMail "customer" for close to a decade soon) isn't the profile, it's the human. I have strong faith that Google can be successful in keeping humans from reading my e-mail (or a computer-generated digest of it, which is what the profile amounts to), and so I don't worry about the existence of the profile.
Yes, end-to-end encryption would fix all this, but it would also fix it in OP's satirical mail service, as well as in GMail - so that's really a tangential point.
Trusting that those providers don't start siphoning off a copy of your mail (or are indeed diskless and not out of malice or incompetence actually just using regular disks. Also, being diskless is worthless if they are still keeping your mail around in memory anyway) is no different than trusting Google to keep humans away from my email.
Secondly, intent matters. Killing a person can be a pure accident, can be manslaughter, can be first degree premeditated murder. You might attempt to dumb it down to "It doesn't matter, the person is dead" -- but that isn't how the US legal system, or the majority of people think.
If the intent of a system is to allow the profiles to be read by people (or shipped to government) that is very different than if the intent it to be exclusively used by software.