No. Nobody that I heard of in the international data protection or IT community was talking about what happened. What was happening was unbeknownst to all of us until this spring. One of the länders'--they're like the German provinces--data protection supervisors, who have jurisdiction over a lot of the private sector in Germany, started a discussion with Google that quickly became public because they suspected that Google was scooping up personal information.
As I remember the newspaper reports, Google initially denied it, in retrospect because they did not know themselves that they were scooping up personal information. That's how they store...and that's just in April-May of this year.