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by asiachick 1490 days ago
you're getting the use of the service..... for free...Yeesh!

Consider before Google Maps. You'd either (a) buy a local map every few years (b) pay for a car navigation system. Now Google comes along and offers you a free maps and navigation service and you're complaining that if you try to make it better you're being screwed over? IT'S FREE!
2 comments
bprasanna 1490 days ago
Yes, it's free and good. Im not complaining about the Google Maps as a product, but i'm complaining about the system built around Google Maps. 1. I don't know how many contributors of Google Maps know the API side of the story. If they knew that will they be ready to contribute for free? 2. Though Google might have touched about selling user data in Terms & Conditions, the Terms & Conditions themselves are big trap worded with complex sentences having many pages. Yes, i may be lazy/dumb not to go through pages of T&C, and i accept that part of my mistake. 3. For a Google Maps contributor, when they contribute apart from giving them the points and appreciation, Google never tells them their contributed data is going to be sold in the form of API (in a visible manner). Whereas in YouTube the contributors do know, they may get compensated upon N number of views.

In overall the point is similar to everyone's complaint on Google, "User data is being used to their favour" but my expectation is for Google to openly and visibly tell that so all the competitors have level playing ground.

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szastamasta 1490 days ago
Google is making a lot of money on Maps. The consumer app is free only so you feed them free data from your rides. They also kicked out of business all competition (hard to compete with free). And as usual with monopolies, when there’s no competition, you can do what you want. Wait for it. In few years it will be shut down or will cost a lot if they no longer can sell your data to someone else.
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astrange 1490 days ago
Google Maps has lots of competition. Bing, OSM, Apple, CityMapper, HERE, Yahoo Japan, TomTom, Garmin, Waze even though they own it… I could keep going.
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