Generally, the products Google offers for free involve them using the data you put into it to tailor their products and services to you. Not having examined the EULA, I don't know if this product is similar, but in general, that is the reason my legal department does not react nicely when projects try to bring google products into our ecosystem.

Yes, open them up to the NSA (and therefore other three letter agencies as well)

Not the PP, but though I have never come across anything substantive, there have been persistent rumors that Google M&A (and other) folks trawl through GMail to gain competitive advantages and negotiating leverage, particularly vs. startups.

OTOH, the rumors are most often of the "my 2nd cousin's mother-in-law's half-brother's secretary's boyfriend's ex-husband" variety, ie. not even anonymous 1st hand claims.

Anecdotally, these rumors seem to most often be spread by Enterprise SaaS salespeople.

I feel those rumors are just incorrect from my previous experience working in Google.

You are almost certainly right, but it is worth noting the considerable amount of FUD spread by interested parties that feeds into these sort of rumors.

OTOH, "The NSA has a backdoor into Google" used to be something only paranoids believed too...

Not just wrong but practically impossible.

Why impossible? Isn't mass data mining already in place for gmail in order to provide targeted ads?

Because Google's production systems aren't internally open like that, other teams can't just go grepping through production data systems (which is encrypted at rest anyway). Yes, there are obviously systems which do index data for search, spam prevention, etc, but those are guarded too, and the surface area of access is greatly reduced.

You can't just decide "Hey, I've got an idea for a cool 20% project, I'm going to try crawling all mail and looking for stock market tips". There is defense in depth, in terms of technical walls, as well as people walls, that makes something like that very unlikely. With tens of thousands of employees, it would be easy to get 1 rogue employee who could do serious damage with that kind of access.

Google takes data security and privacy very very seriously, and a breach of that magnitude would threaten hundreds of billions in valuation for a rather crazy risky idea for an M&A department?

Great, thanks for the taking the time to reply.

BTW, Google Ventures has a better way to do this which relies on public data, Project Sandhill.

By looking at data from Crunchbase, Angelist, etc you can get a deeper graph of the interrelationships in Silicon Valley. If I was looking at who to invest in, or M&A, I'd be looking at data like that, as well as talking with investors and people they've worked with.

Wouldn't this be the opposite of mass data mining?

"Which startups are good acquisition targets?" is very much a data-mining problem, though I would expect that noticing a startup experiencing "hockey stick" growth based on the growth of their Google Cloud Platform bill (or perhaps the # of users logging in with Google credentials, etc.) is much more likely than any Google employees (no matter how highly placed) trawling through Gmail looking for proprietary information.