No matter what one wants to think of Google, there is not a single ounce of meat on this story.
I'd like to agree. If this was true, this would be very shocking news for me and a lot of other people. I work for one of the many startups, which use google docs and google mail. If Google would be willing to look at journalist's emails to "find a leak". How could any company trust them not to look at their secret communication? Especially if they had a real interest in doing so at some point, so they wanted to launch a competing product, invest in a competitor or acquire the company in question?
Evidence or not, if you find yourself in a situation where a company would gain a significant competitive advantage over you by accessing your communications, it would be just be prudent not to voluntarily store all of that information on that company's servers.
But even assuming the most vile malice on Google's part, the vast, vast majority of the data people store on their services just isn't interesting to them (except to algorithmically process to serve ads).
I'd like to agree. If this was true, this would be very shocking news for me and a lot of other people. I work for one of the many startups, which use google docs and google mail. If Google would be willing to look at journalist's emails to "find a leak". How could any company trust them not to look at their secret communication? Especially if they had a real interest in doing so at some point, so they wanted to launch a competing product, invest in a competitor or acquire the company in question?