[billjings]

Facebook did exactly this with a VPN acquisition. They didn't break into customer data; they just mined it for usage patterns.

So as a pure speculation on Goog's motives, it doesn't sound farfetched enough to call ridiculous. Competitive data is valuable, particularly if you want to strangle the youth in their cradles (or acquire them).

[breppp]

google is not facebook, and an ad-supported consumer software is not cloud. OP talked about AI training which is a bit more than metadata

also, the vpn example ended in court