I refuse to believe, without evidence, that Google even has the ability to look at your data when it is only stored locally on your phone and not on their servers.

And that is reasonable. Perhaps, this why they push cloud photo storage on people. Every new phone does.

They don't need to secretly scrape your phone's storage if everything you do is part of your Google drive or your gmail. This guy may have actually gmail'ed the photos. It's what the phone is setup to do.