Google cares a lot about protecting user's privacy. Take a look at their privacy policy. For example, what other API provider requires you to get security audits ($15k-$75k yearly) when handling sensitive user data.

i think a lot of people never really understood googles business model.

google absolutely wants to protect their users privacy from third parties. their ideal situation would be if they're the only one's knowing everything about their users so they can allow third parties to advertise things to their users. if they'd leak any of this information, they'd be compromising their main business model.

so yes, people can trust google to do their everything to keep their information from reaching anyone else, including forcing said third parties to undergo paid audits to verify that nobody is leeching their user data.

for some reason, a lot of people got it into their head that google literally sells information. i'm not sure why this ever started, as - at least as far as i am aware - google never tried to do anything even remotely like that

This. Big Tech companies or their divisions are advertising service companies and AI cults. They sell targeting, not the raw data. The data is useful for selling targeting services and feeding their AIs, actually selling it to others would be stupid of them.

Yeah…because Google and all other big tech want a monopoly on user data. Do you think any of them want to ever not protect user privacy in the way you defined it?

They still have all this data on users. They don’t even tell you what they have. They have the BS marketing of Google Takeout. It includes nothing about the profile they have made on me. The logs and data they have on what I have clicked, etc.

Google wants to even protect you or I from knowing how much data they have. That’s not the protection any one should want.