Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.") may well apply here. It could just be a bug.
Unfortunately I can't find the story of that Mozilla developer that recounted how many times Google introduced "bugs" that only harmed Firefox, and how long it took them to realize this was malicious due to applying Hanlon's razor.
The fact is, if your opponent is even moderately intelligent, Hanlon's razor guarantees to keep you blind to their intentions.
[0] https://bgr.com/tech/google-maps-forces-you-to-share-locatio...
If you use Google Maps to get around, you probably know that Google has to access your location information. That’s the only way that it can offer turn-by-turn navigation and direction features.
Plenty of map apps can calculate a route offline and offer navigation, without any data leaving the device. But Google and other companies want to keep people ignorant of how much can be done offline, so they have an excuse to spy on us.