so, how do we know that is a compilation of years of hacking individual mails. Be it media hype should not individual intimation is a necessity. Normally forums do get hacked but they are announcing and giving clues to how to overcome those.
I do not think that it is a media hype. Google collects lot of data from individuals in their server, as global use it , and if their servers could be compromised, then it is possible that it could be a lot of details of the gmail profile including pws might have been compromised.
If those about whose data about compromised are not alerted, then anything might happen to any data and google will simply keep mum over .
It is useless to ask google to not take much data from users and there are sites, which even does not remember the passwords, and if one fogot, has to re enter the new password and has to remember. the sites does not store passwords.
But take the case of google, if you browse, it is not enough if you clear the history from the concerned browser, but you have to go to the webpage, and select those links and then bulk delete it , if you want to get rid of those history of pages visited. That being the case, even those links storage may also be easily fetched by those hackers.
By keeping mum to individual secrecy is good, but globally keeping mum to a pin pointed hack is another. god save