Why you should honestly care that Google is now part of Alphabet

[Commentary] Companies such as Nest and Google Fiber are going to split off from the main ship, presumably to develop into fuller companies of their own. If things go well for those entities, that means more products labeled with Alphabet — rather than Google — in the world. That, in turn, raises questions about data collection.

It's no secret that Google picks up a lot of data from its services. Right now, Google has a unified privacy policy, meaning that a lot of data flows into one bucket that gets used across Google's services. And it's not yet clear exactly how the data will continue flowing under this new structure. Google declined to comment on how the privacy policies between Alphabet companies and Google will work. For all we know, each company may get its own policy. But right now we just don't know how this affects the troves of data Google holds. And that's a key question for consumers as this whole thing moves forward. Because the long-term effect of this change is that Google, or rather Alphabet, could become even more ubiquitous than it already is. That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Big conglomerates aren't automatically evil; there's nothing nefarious, for example, about the fact that Dairy Queen and Geico are both Berkshire Hathaway companies. But — particularly since Google has traditionally relied so much on the collection of personal data — the possibility that Alphabet may become the "Berkshire Hathaway for tech" down the line should prompt the average consumer to pay closer attention.