Even the engineers that actually work on googles production systems can't access other peoples gmail/whatever accounts (that is technically _and_ policy-wise). Certainly not any random recruiter. How do you imagine this would work? Thousands of google employees that can just look into their boyfriends email?

They make it pretty clear that event the higher ups/etc will never ever look into specific private accounts and anybody attempting to do so will be fired on the spot.

No.

Editing to add: One of the quickest ways to get fired at Google is to violate someone's privacy.

> One of the quickest ways to get fired at Google is to violate someone's privacy.

I expect it's more about violating a corporate-policy than violating customer-privacy.

Ironic, as it could be argued that Google violates everyone's privacy.

Assuming it is limited to programming topics, what if you accidentally pasted something very private while searching something programming related.

...then you end up in one of Peter Norvig's Google search history haikus: http://www.codersatwork.com/peter-norvig.html