After working there for eight years, I can confirm the contrary of this statement. Google cares very much about user privacy -- the engineers doing the work even more so. The quote from one of their SREs swearing about the Snowden revelations was drop dead true, and engineers there have been working /very/ hard to fix issues like this.

Google does not operate like Apple -- there are many hands at the tiller, and the ship moves in almost arbitrary directions at times. Situations like this do come up, and they are most of the time honest mistakes or oversights.