It’s not easy to obtain a database of all the publicly available photos of yourself. The concern is that organizations with modest resources can generate a better picture of individuals’ public footprints than the individuals can.

As an individual, you have to try your luck with collections of images that happen to be publicly accessible, whereas large entities have access to many, many more images (all private collections in the cloud for example, or security camera material) and can search them systematically. That's a big difference IMHO.

At the moment (as someone who works at a large company), it honestly seems easier to scrape->do something sketchy with the data than it would be to overcome the internal privacy protections that are in place at a large company.

Not all large companies are alike.

https://threatpost.com/facebook-to-pay-550m-to-settle-class-...

Do the internal restrictions apply to everybody at Google (my guess from your past comments) equally, or are there departments with easier access, government contracts etc.?

I can’t speak for all of Google (maybe there is something secret I don’t know about, although I doubt it given how much leaking there has been), but for the sensitive data I have had to deal with for my job, I’m not aware of anyone having a way of bypassing the controls.