How did that debacle "align with Google's business interests"?

Payload data can be used to inform their advertising efforts.

Two other points:

1. After an engineer alerted his supervisor of the "accident" it continued anyway so even if it was a sincere accident, nobody gave a enough of shit to rectify it.

2. Google still has the data two years after they were supposed to have deleted it, which they blame on communication issues as to how to delete it. Is Google saying the don't having the engineering know how to properly dispose of data if needed.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Google-Failed-to-Delet...