Comment Re:This wouldn't be a big deal except (Score 0) 560
Um, you have your order wrong there. Germany requested the data (saying they wanted to make sure it wasn't PII that was collected) AFTER Google admitted to collecting it and offered to destroy it with witnesses. In other words, Germany wanted access to the data for data mining, not to prevent the leakage of PII, or else destroying the data would have been sufficient as it was in many other countries.
I'm not surprised you have no citations, because that is just dead wrong. Read the links provided above, or any other reputable news source as it happened. What you are talking about is the discussion between Google and Germany that happened after the timeline described above.
When Google admittet to have collected privacy data (after Germany demanded to audit, which they did after Google had assured them no privacy info were being collected) - then there was a discussion where Google wanted to delete the data rather than hand them over to the German authorities which continued to insist on auditing the data (as they had demanded from the very start to audit what was being collected, before anybody knew that anything was wrong).