I work for Google, and I can assure you, we do 100,000 things by mistake every day.

In your narrative, would Google have self-reported this intrusion? Because, they didn't have to, and they did it anyway.

You are very paranoid if you think a corporation with thousands of employees never makes mistakes.

First of all, the public should do something about their privacy, if they are concerned about their privacy. Parents are teaching their children that anything they do on the internet is never private.

Nonetheless, I doubt I'm naive to believe engineers are not always making mistakes. The trick is always in admitting mistake, learning from them, and fixing the future. In this case, Google acknowledged the -- lawful -- slip in privacy encroachments and assigned a privacy director to oversee engineering and product management efforts. Every Google product now maintains a privacy-design document.

Given some of the other revelations, is it too tinfoil-hat to entertain the notion that Google were compelled to make the aforementioned slip-up?

Almost certainly it is, but would I be surprised if it were true? Would anyone be?

I'd be willing to bet the NSA had a good browse of the resulting data, either way.