[superuser2]

In any organization of Google's size, there are bound to be a few bad apples. The organization can still see that as totally wrong and do its best to remove them, whether out of professional integrity or simple self-preservation instinct.

This happens in major, respected newspapers. It happens in an extremely disciplined and well-trained superpower's military. Small town telephone operators were sometimes known to spy on the communications of people they knew, and post office workers would sometimes gossip about postal metadata. Organizations can still have integrity (ok, well, maybe not telecoms) when there are a handful of swiftly punished incidents. I'd be concerned if there was a culture of disregard for privacy or a lack of internal controls, unrestricted access for everyone (Barksdale was a Site Reliability Engineer with a legitimate need to access production data, I believe), or no punishment, but this case doesn't invalidate Google's products.