> It is 'reasonably possible' for Google to give this person access to his data.
This is not necessarily true. For example, the data might contain material which is illegal to distribute. I'm not sure what can be done in a case like that.
It's not my service, and I'm talking about the general case rather than this specific one, but that seems to me like it would be pretty complicated - you'd need some sort of review procedure to determine what material can and cannot be distributed, you'd need to somehow do this while preserving user privacy, and you'd need some engineering work to make all this possible.
A project of that scope could take weeks or months to complete, depending on the amount of data involved.
Presumably the blog was only deleted because there's already some review procedure in place, and it found something that can't be distributed.
I thought it was obvious from context that I was referring to the specific case in the article.
Anyway, I don't think the general case you're describing makes sense or is very realistic. It's impossible to know some part of the data collection can't be distributed without somebody or something looking at it. Either the person reporting it, or the algorithm flagging it should be able to identify the specific data items that can't be distributed.
In this case the best decision is probably to stop distributing them to the world but still enable the original owner/uploader to download them.