"David Drummond, chief legal officer for Google, said the American advertising network was working the US government to deal with the NSA's mass snooping on innocent netizens."
So a company with an interest in seeing every bit of data they can get their hands on, is "lobbying" the government to avoid doing the same, Google are quite possibly the most powerful data monger in the world because they are being given their data in many cases voluntarily. But they need to be reigned in. They are also acquiring much data that has not been voluntarily provided, such as when a contractor working on a project copies commercial information contained in email threads over to his private Google Mail account, or when they read my personal contact details delivered to them courtesy of a friends address book, or when a report is copied to a Google Docs account. Multiply up this "web" of personal data across their user base, index it as they have, factor in all the knowledge of illicit activity courtesy of Google Mail accounts set up for naughty purposes, and regardless of the rights wrongs, cleverness or stupidity of the users, there is an incredible amount of information that could be used to coerce, exploit or influence. Plus there is NO, undertaking (despite disingenuous privacy statements worded to sound as though there are built in protections) that a human Google admin cannot view all this information. There is huge temptation, massive power through information available, and the only protection against corruption and abuse by the most powerful surveillance network in the world (Google not the NSA - on the basis freely given info and a massive global unparalleled indexing and semantic analysis capability on a scale not available to any other agency, means Google have uninhibited insight in all the data in their domain) is an open door and promise "we wouldn't do that."
People need to wake up. Google is already too powerful and, if they haven't already started to use their information base to leverage power in ways that are close to the line or even crossing the line, rooting them out after they do will be a nigh on impossible task.