[jerf]

Well, between "Google is tracking people with cell phones to look at their common patterns and doing AI on the data", "Google actually sent out a surveyor to a hunting lease to track this guy's new trail", or "Google purchased someone else's survey of the new hunting trail", I find the first one most plausible by quite a bit.

I live in a less rural area but I've still noticed a handful of things in my area marked as more complete roads than they should be. Nobody in person would mistake them for even the lowest grade of official road in use around here.

[notatoad]

I find "google purchased a set of map data that said this creek bed was a road" to be much more plausible than any other scenario

[cowsandmilk]

Google regularly sends surveys to people showing they are tracking their movements. Like you’ll eat at a restaurant and get a survey about it. They don’t even hide this fact that they do this:

https://support.google.com/surveys/answer/6315313?hl=en

They ask you questions about train rides and bus rides as well. Google doesn’t buy data any more, they collect it.

Why wouldn’t they be tracking where people drive and building maps about new roads from that?

[notatoad]

>Google doesn’t buy data any more

again, is this something you know to be true, or are you just guessing?