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Comment by urbandw311er | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been saying this about Google Maps for years, especially their vast collection of public transport loading data and real time road speeds.

People are duped into thinking they’re doing some “greater good” by completing the in-app surveys and yet the data they give back is for Google’s exclusive use and, in fact, deepens their moat.

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It's not solely for Google's benefit. They're ("we're" tbh) contributing data that improves services that we use. It has additional selfish and altruistic benefits beyond feeding the Googly beast.

As a Google maps user, I benefit from that data being in there.

IIRC Google maps basically does not make money. I wonder if there can be a government deal to subsidize it on the condition that the data be open sourced.

Google maps would if it sold the data to Google. My guess is there is a line item for that or at least on paper for tax purposes.

They made 11B$ last year. It has incredible amount of ads. If you haven't noticed, then that means they did a great job. (tip: look for the custom logo pins in the map. Its printing money)

While I have no way to validate this, I highly suspect that the routing algorithm is also subtly manipulated. There is a route I drive with regular frequency that contains a roughly 20 mile section of two mostly parallel roads, one for through traffic and one for local. Every single time I drive through, Google routes me to the local traffic road. I know for certain the local road is slightly slower and it's also simply incorrect. The only way it makes sense is if it's a bug, or my hunch is that Google weights the route a little higher because it goes by a bunch of businesses that pay for advertising.

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