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...
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?
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.
"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.
Of course a lot of farming is simply done by mass labour, which works if a little inefficient. On the high tech side we have GPS-controlled tractors and farmers can order up hyperpsectral images of their fields to check crop performance. Modern agriculture is extremely heavily industrialised to satisfy the demands of the billions of hungry people around the world.
I'm not sure how literally the OP meant the word "industrialized," but to me it seems like the goal of the PFC is actually less agricultural industrialization. If it's sad that a computer is helping to grow your food, ok. But I think the point is that a local farmer could improve their crops, or you could even grow food in your own house.
I think the concept is awesome and I'm totally up for building one, though having looked at their Github it's pretty rough and ready right now.
On the one hand I think there is something cool about old school gardening and actually growing your own stuff. On the other, the geek in me wants to hack the hell out of it. One of the major problems I have every time I want to grow salad is that it gets destroyed by snails and indoor gardening solves the pest problem quite nicely. Being able to download an ideal growth profile for a particular seed would be great.
Just what I wanted to see rural America displaced by -- dusty shipping containers stretching to the horizon, each with PV on top and a Monsanto logo on the side...
Don't worry though. This fills a niche similar to current-gen 3D printers: extremely useful for rapid R&D, but despite the hype simply too expensive and energy-intensive to undercut conventional production on a mass scale.
Yes, I feel sad about it too, though most seem to respond to this that it's a good and exciting thing.. Reading One Straw Revolution is the best way I can explain the feeling.
If you're saying this to suggest that students from Stanford or similar schools are able to attain better offers, then sure. If you're saying this to suggest that companies give students from Stanford vs students from "worse" schools better offers, that's not true.
