well they wouldn't be very good spies if that happened.

Look at how good russian spies were at infiltrating the gov't : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five , and tell me that china couldn't do the same or better.

This is the 1950s though, infrastructure like Google's is surely to have logs and security teams. Unless they physically shove a USB into a production server and rip content. I'm pretty confident you could secure a data center, the only other way is to install sketchy processing chipsets that phone home or something.

You're probably right, they might have some sketchy way, but if you really wanted to see who is doing what with your data from within your data center you could really set controls to do so.