How can you ever trust anyone like that ? Unless, you see the line of code that is deleting the data ?. It's kind of unfair when people on HN take Apple by their word and for Google "oh is it really deleted though" ?
If a current employee is willing to vouch for it, that carries some weight. It's a useful data point.
Because google makes its revenue from user data.
Do you have a better solution ?. No one will use the products if it costs some non-trivial amount. And no this thread doesn't represent the billions of non-US non-rich people that use Google.