He was making a good point. Huge multinationals often have departments with wildly different behaviors/policies. These departments are often in conflict with one another, or don’t know so much about one another. I agree with you trusting anything remotely associated to Google is utterly stupid when it comes to privacy, but the argument exposed was not stupid.

It was in fact solid insider’s advice, to know to exploit differences between branches of a given tentacular company in some circumstances. For example, Debian’s cooperation with Lenovo for better hardware support is in fact a collaboration with a specific department within Lenovo, and has a lot of blocking points from other departments.

EDIT: Also another good point was that selfhosting services (eg. services just for “me”) often leaks more metadata than using shared services which other folks connect to as well.