One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system and therefore breaking the seal over any sin is equal to dismantling the institution itself. This argument is literally the same structure used to defend attorney client confidentiality, psychiatrist patient confidentiality, corporations(telcos, email providers, platforms) from handing all data to the state. But for all those cases the state has manahed to add huge amount of expceptions which it has not been aable to do with the Church. So the Churchs defense of the seal almost since 1215 has stood on a Belief. A story literally. That privacy is requires for repair.

Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story.

Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about.

So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.

The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles).

The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc).

Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.