It's their business model:
More surveillance => most precise profiles on Internet users => most precise ad targeting => higher margin => more $$$
To quote Steve Rambam from HOPE: "If you're angry about what the NSA is doing, you should be furious about what Google and Facebook are doing."
IMHO the Amazon Echo and similar beyond-Orwellian devices will someday be looked back upon with the same amount of "what were they thinking?!!?!" as stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
To continue with the nuclear analogy: I've been predicting a privacy/security "Chernobyl" event related to mobile and/or IoT for many years now. It'll be something like a corporate whistleblower revealing that a company has been running all ambient sound from all customers' houses through speech to text for over a year, then putting it all in a database and selling access more or less indiscriminately. Customers, it will come out, will include organized crime, foreign governments, etc., and some of the data will turn out to be from the homes of US Government Secret and Top Secret clearance employees, CXO level corporate personnel, police, etc. Only a matter of time. I'm counting the days.
I'd say by 2020 or so there will be a major well publicized leak or scandal from such a vendor.
It'd be hard to place a bet though, since it'd be hard to decide if/when a bet were actually won.
I'm not sure how other lines of betting work, but interested in proposals.
And, of course, we would have to agree on odds. Eg, if you are really sure you could offer to pay me 5 USD if your prediction comes true, but I'd only have to pay 1 USD otherwise. (Or if I feel more sure, I could offer eg to pay 7 USD for every 4 USD you wager.)
More than corruption, my concerns would be respect and understanding of privacy, checks and balances through neutrality, transparency, and decentralization, and creation of open standards and protocols, etc.
I would not say Schmidt is corrupt, he is acting fully in the interest of his firm or organization. Like a defense attorney helping a murderer avoid jail his actions are broadly ethical, but if you consider in aggregate all of the betrayals of "don't be evil" that Google suffered under his command, it's clear that he is not in any sense a leader in any area where values or principles are important.
Net Neutrality is a perfect example of an issue where Google has a big stake in a particular outcome, and there is nothing idealistic or principled about its advocacy of one side. This is fine as an aspect of the incentives of capitalism, but the scary part is that so many people bought into the propaganda and did not see Google's true motivation.
All this is thanks to the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit which led Google to choose someone like Schmidt to ingratiate the company with lawmakers to prevent a similar lawsuit.