[koolba]

> If this is just a way to buy deep data sets, then this makes sense. $150M for likely the best training set for food review in existence makes sense and therefore isn’t Google stupidly investing in review sites. It would also explain the buy and sell technique used on Boston Dynamics, Moto, and others.

It'd only make sense if they couldn't acquire the data set directly for less than the price difference and transaction. An M&A deal for Google isn't cheap and comes with a lot of oversight, risk, and scrutiny.

[prepend]

In some situations data can not be sold if the privacy policy only allows internal use. For example, gmail doesn’t allow my mail to be sold or loaned to anyone, but google can access the data to show ads and for quality control. (See https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse)

Google is unlikely to be purchased. But if the NSA bought google, then it could use my gmail data -per the privacy agreement that I agreed to- “services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content.”

This is only possible if the organization is purchased.