W3W is very aggressive about protecting their IP, they don't want it to be a standard anyone can use like lat/long.

They advertise it as being useful for search/rescue as you can provide a precise location over an unclear voice channel. They conveniently ignore that speaking numbers is clearer than speaking random words.

I'm sure there's more I'm unaware of.

One reason is that there are a lot of similar words in the dictionary. It is easy to mishear the wrong location especially when they are close together. Some of the words are long and complicated. Another is that they are random which means can't navigate from the codes.

They are missing feature of some codes that can have variable length for variable precision.

Yep local police partnered with them causing local SAR to go “don’t use it”

https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/whistler-search...

https://globalnews.ca/news/8258671/north-shore-rescue-what3w...

Basically the company wants to make money off it so are pushing it and it’s problematic due to it being less easy to use then standard gps cords, words sound the same, and most people have no idea what it is (and nor should they learn lat long)