Fair enough, we've spent a lot of effort at Blekko (also a search engine) at being conscientious designing ways that we can dis-associate data from users in order to protect our users from data that can be tied back to them. Since our taxes are reasonably straight-forward at this point it is entirely possible that we've invested more time in keeping peoples identities protected in our data than we have in minimizing our tax burden. We are a prima facie example of "someone" who has spent more effort on X than Y. But arguing exemplars misses the point.

I am sure that Google is a much different place than when I left it, hell it was different between the time I joined and left. That said ...

The comparison I was trying to make, and I grant you that it is imperfect, is that Google, like Apple, has billions of dollars in free cash flow and in legal testimony lately they have shown great creativity in ways to shuffle that cash around so as to avoid being required to hand it over to various revenue agencies. Google is also has billions of data points about all of the individuals that use its services. If those data points were dollars, and the revenue agencies were intelligence agencies, what creative ways might they come up with to disassociate which data point belongs to which user such that they could still use the data but not be compelled to hand it over. Just like they use those free cash dollars rather than hand some percentage over as tax.

I've got nothing but respect for the smart people at Google, and still have friends that work there (and folks who used to work here and are now working there :-). Perhaps I'm misreading your tone but it sounds like you want to pick a fight.