You're going to have to solve one of those anyway. Why not put it to good use? This isn't part of some evil master-plan Google's come up with. It was originally

You're going to have to solve one of those anyway. Why not put it to good use? This isn't part of some evil master-plan Google's come up with. It was originally a project at CMU, and is now used to power what is probably the only neural network that can match whole house numbers (ie. without segmentation.) How is that bad for anyone? Personally, I really love Google's symbiotic model for data collection eg. Recaptcha/Google Maps, Ingress/Google Maps, etc.