Sometimes bad things happen, and they're not anyone's fault. The person involved didn't have consistent names between their office and personal gmail accounts, and used their private gmail account to contact the office.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the article doesn't seem to explore any other scenario other than Google being in the wrong and the individual being in the right.

Maybe I am reading it wrong but I dont think it says google was at fault as such (the HN headline is far more inflamatory than the actual headline). It more higlights the risk that changes in android brings with that might not be obvious to the user.