"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."

He was trying to have that conversation years before Snowden's leaks, and look at the reward he got: people claiming he hates privacy even though he's giving you exact information on how google cannot be your confidant when the US government is involved, and to look elsewhere if you need that.

Not many CEOs are that frank, but look what happened. Gawker quoted only that single sentence out of that whole paragraph, and everyone (even the EFF[1]) quoted Gawker, so as far as someone reading those stories would know, that's all he said. With that kind of coverage (and "advocacy" groups like Consumer Watchdog egging it on), we should know exactly why more CEOs don't speak that frankly, and why all we get is corporate non-speak instead.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

"an office romance that is being blamed for a split between co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, and the sudden resignation of another senior male executive who was the former boyfriend of Brin's new love interest."

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/sergey-brin...

If you want to go tabloid, there's Gawker:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistres...