The truth is that most services will have a set of devops with access to personal information. And some times, we need to look at private data to solve issues like this. My first instinct back then was that some smart hacker had created a FUSE support for Link or something similar.

Opera Link did not encrypt bookmarks and speeddials etc, but had datatypes encrypted with master password, even while syncing. We where two people with the access and knowledge to access individual user information, and we took it very serious.

GP is talking about something implemented in 2008. It was a different time and a different mentality.