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Because access (even if they do, which they dont) to startup emails is not enough to replicate startup's success.

Perhaps not, but it's more than enough to find out strategy, preempt potential competitive advantage, reconstruct development patterns, cherry pick staff members, and gain a huge upper hand in takeover negotiations (potentially driving down acquisition price based on unfortunate private data).

Would you write down everything you're doing, and post it to a competitor? Because if you work in an area Google's interested in then that's what you're doing, modulo a privacy policy you'll never find out they've violated (and has happened at least once before - http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-googl...).

Good point on the cherry-picking of staff members. I could definitely see Google releasing something like Google Me based on their Gmail and if they did something like Buzz, you'd have your entire company (Google App domain) in the open.

In this day and age, information travels fast enough that trying to keep a lid on your top talent is probably useless, but still good to have that information under your control.

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