My read says the data was compromised.
It looks like they gave access to “outside developers”.
How much do you want to bet it was on purpose?
How much do you want to bet that those “outside developers” were carefully chosen? Or paid for the access?
How much do you want to bet that those “outside developers” had political motivations or plans to exploit the data?
How much do you want to bet that those “outside developers” did not destroy all copies of data they had access to?
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... and most of all, how much do you want to bet that it doesn’t matter so much that “outside developers” had access to the data because Google itself would abuse the data in the same manner? In fact, I would be highly suspicious that the “outside developers” story is either to cover for what Google itself is doing or to put some distance between Google and the exploiters of the data.
JMO, JMSpeculation.
I think that’s right on - I was struck that “Q” posted the 3 articles that each referred to the 3 companies doing the same thing. This was not a coincide. My guess is that data shared in such means ultimately went to the same people (so it could be correlated at higher level).
However, reading the post(s) again, I’m thinking that there are two factors here - one is that the companies wouldn’t want to expose their culpability here. but two is that if GOOG was served with a preservation order, then they couldn’t reveal what had transpired before without having to explain the preservation order which is likely among the thousands of sealed FILINGS (vs. strictly indictments).