The article pretty much gets Google's philosophy on this correct. Google, having cut their teeth on being pioneers in search in a world where people were still

The article pretty much gets Google's philosophy on this correct. Google, having cut their teeth on being pioneers in search in a world where people were still figuring out what the consequences of vastly collating human data at scale were, found themselves all too often the moral and philosophical pioneers as well, whether or not they wanted to be. As a consequence, they have heavy skepticism about both government and public capacity to self-regulate here. Neither group has usually done either the deep reflection or trial by fire that Google has in figuring out all of the parameters of the problem, all of the consequences of the decisions, etc. In short, they trust themselves more than they trust anybody else and they put their lobbying money in places that allow them to maximize acting on that self-trust. They'd rather be making mistakes and correcting them than forced to make what they perceive to be the wrong decision by bad ideas baked into unmovable law. Good bad or indifferent, that's where they're coming from. (And to be clear, this is not an endorsement of their position. I think people who believe that there is a gap between that self-image and of the reality of the decisions they've made as de facto arbiters of privacy online have plenty of evidence to bring to the table to support their position.)