| I think there are three categories of projects at Google: 1) Working out how they can milk even more money out of their magic cash cow of online advertising by providing more opportunities to serve ads (YouTube, Gmail, Maps) 2) Protecting their magic cash cow (ads) from external threats, the main threat being a loss of tracking (Chrome, Android, Fibre, Google Analytics, Ok Google, Maps). (As an aside, if you use Chrome and want to avoid this kind of behaviour, please consider swapping to a truly open source non-tracking browser) 3) Trying to find another magic cash cow before the first one runs out of milk (Eg Google Cloud, YouTube Red) Some things will fall into multiple buckets, for example Google Maps and Gmail offers both an opportunity to further track users and serve them ads - double whammy! I suspect Google Cars are more about category 3, although have no doubt that they will be mined for data as much as possible to serve categories 1 & 2. Agree with your point on fibre - it looks like that is an attempt to own even more of the tech stack to provide even more methods to track. |