To me, if Google uses insider knowledge to copy Uber, then that would be huge mistake and credibility killer; if they want to build up their own competitor from scratch without any insider knowledge, then that's their business.
To me, if Google uses insider knowledge to copy Uber, then that would be huge mistake and credibility killer; if they want to build up their own competitor from scratch without any insider knowledge, then that's their business.
Through a paranoid lens, Google APIs are corporate espionage you sign up for. Since Google is a valuable and entrenched service provider, they can get away with it. What I could see companies doing in return is attempting to obscure their API usage by fabricating requests. For example, Uber could break the correspondence between API requests and trips by sending requests that look authentic but don't correspond to any actual trips. This kind of corporate information warfare sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel, but it certainly feels present and real when you look at Google's relationships.