We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.

I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I believe what this paragraph says is that Google reserves the right to turn over to legal authorities any information they want to if it’s requested of them. To say that “Google gave into the pressure to lift their confidentiality duty to its users” is to assign to them a duty that may exist in the collective consciousness but which has no basis in their published terms and conditions or privacy policy and therefore if Google were to NOT turn over this information they would be in violation of their own policy, and if they don’t keep their own policy then that would seem to be in violation of a much larger and more important duty.

Now, if you want to claim that Google has a duty to change their terms and conditions to say “We’ll never share your personal information no matter what.” then that’s another matter.