Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.
This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
The guy in TFA should be a warning to others: you cannot trust other machines to handle your data responsibly. They'll turn on you and demand a ransom when it's convenient. Self-host, and own your infrastructure.
It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it.
A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.
A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff.
If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc.
That's very different from someone losing something on your property.
I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.
Not sure if it works with the 'drive' but does with google cloud storage: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-trans...
But more importantly these devices are only for uploading to GCP, not exporting data from.