Tbh this sounds perfectly normal to me. Companies often don't think it's worth defending themselves if theres no actual financial damage, and certainly don't want random employees to be doing it. It can be very frustrating, both for employees who want to defend their reputation and for the public who want the truth, but companies can be extremely conservative about chosing their public relations battles.

> don't want to tell the people around them

It's probably more that they don't want to tell competitors anything they don't absolutely have to.

You can assume that any company at a large scale will not want to divulge any information unless absolutely necessary. Doesn't matter if you or I think that it might not need to be secret or might not be competitive. Unless there is both an internal push, a need and a sort of proof dat the information can be released, it will never happen. You'll usually find thing that are simplified or aggregated for PR and marketing, or things that are required for legal reasons, but everything else stays internal.

I worked at google as well.

They published a lot of less specific info (PUE numbers, water efficiency, etc)

They were very sensitive about any site specific numbers.