Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it did contain a request to not notify according to that same letter. I suppose that brings up several questions. 1. Does that mean the same thing in the ToS? 2. How valid are these requests?
I'm very curious about this. Google knows users care about their privacy, and it made the promise in its terms precisely for that reason. People pay attention to this stuff, as the popularity of this story shows. Therefore, it's generally not going to be in Google's interest to break its own terms. So what's going on? Did a Google employee simply mess up? Is the reporting not accurate or missing key details, e.g. Goo…
Do Google users care about their privacy? I'd expect not, given that Google is (and hasn't been shy about telling us about it) reading all their emails in order to provide more targeted advertisements.
And, as I mentioned, Google hasn't been shy about saying that's exactly what they do (prioritizing their ad revenue over their users' privacy), so I have to assume that Google users don't care about their privacy.
If they did care about their privacy, they'd self-host their email on hardware they physically control.
That's orthogonal to Google giving up data to the government, with or without notifying the user(s) in question, except that the above makes clear what we already know: Google doesn't respect the privacy of their users.