bada-boom

What does Nature have to lose from publishing hype? If there's enough pushback, they retract it six years later and wash their hands.

I doubt that Gmail data is considered as publicly available. Access to it is probably restricted even to most Google employees. Or else we would have heard about such gaps, just like we heard of Amazon and Tesla employees access customer's audio/video data.

Ads data is fundamentally different, as it's derivative from user data.

The answer on stackexchange is detailed and high quality. But it's not entertaining and doesn't trigger anyone's sensibilities, so very few upvotes or comments. That's how social media works, like it or not.