> Not sure I am understanding you, but are you implying that it'd be okay for Microsoft to upload all your keystrokes and all your data on your laptop(without letting you know about it) on their servers and show you ads based on them as "long as they do not betray said trust or suffer a security breach" ?

This is a false equivalence. This is not what Google did, nor is it even on the same order of conceptual magnitude as what Google was accused of doing.

> The funny thing is that they're not even obligated to tell you if someone who wasn't supposed to look at your data did so.

We are in agreement that this is wrong.

> It's likely that you wouldn't even know if Schmidt or Nadella read your email this morning and traded stocks based on the information in it and you'd have no legal claims.

I suspect given the current political climate in America and the degree of difficulty Google is having with retention, this is not the case.

The problem with the song and dance of a principled company is that you tend to piss off employees that signed up based on that. And inevitably, that kind of activity will be exposed to employees at some point.