Headline seems to be conflating two different kinds of promises. My recollection is that the promise was that Google and the government wouldn't (couldn't) trac

Headline seems to be conflating two different kinds of promises. My recollection is that the promise was that Google and the government wouldn't (couldn't) track you with the data. That appears to be generally true. Finding a bug that exposes some data is unfortunate, but it seems the be an unintentional mistake. tl;dr, they didn't try to do anything evil, they just failed to be 100% perfect. Also as /u/arsome points out elsewhere, the other apps that can read this data could get better data more easily through another method anyway.