Google was, as we all know, widely seen as benevolent when they were fresh on the scene. I don't know about you guys but I think their wish to "Do no evil" was

Google was, as we all know, widely seen as benevolent when they were fresh on the scene. I don't know about you guys but I think their wish to "Do no evil" was genuine. So what happened? A competitor came long with less scruples. Facebook erupted on the scene very happily crossing the creepy line to wring every bit of data they could out of their users. So Google now has to compete with this company that has far, far more data (advertiser captnip) than they do. And no one really seems to care - Facebook grows to 2 billion users. Google can either be outcompeted on this front, or they can race to compete, gather more and more data. Google perhaps tried to stop Facebook by becoming them, but there's so much money in this industry that people are willing to do anything unethical to get past you to get it. Same with the open web. Same with vendor lock-in. Etc.