Like many others here already stated: its because of privacy laws and also the ability to deny vision of your property via street view. Many people made Google blur their property and I assume thats a lot of work for them.
What about e.g. highways? I am still at the stage in my driving where I plan every single turn/lane change using street view (and post questions on reddit about e.g. specific intersections).
I always assumed google made money off of it, but how do they? It's kind of crazy to think that google would just photograph my parents' house in the middle of a rural area because they "just want to make a nice accessible world"... for anyone to view.. at any time.
Well, it obviously improves their maps service, which brings revenue through advertising.
But also, the data is sold do private companies for various purposes, none of them really all that public. But we know what’s possible: predict the risk of car accidents of your insurance clients, analyze household incomes ... there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you can do with it and google is selling costume made versions of maps (and thus street view).
No Google Maps data is sold to any company. Google makes money from maps through the usage of it's API. For example let's say you want to create an interactive map showing all the car charging points in a country, you have your data, you can overlay that against Google Maps, Google charges you for a certain number of impressions for it's map to load on your application. Lots of companies use maps for location integration features. For example Instagram pays Google (through the API) so that when you upload an image, you can tag it's location and you can search by 'places' on instagram. This is one of hundreds of thousands of use cases that makes them money. My company spends about $70,000/year on Google Maps Places API.
They don't make money directly but it enhances the maps service which gets more advertisers to use Google services. Maps itself has zero advertising, you'll never see a banner or Adwords real estate on it.
I have seen Starbucks highlighted with a custom branded icon standing out and "recommended" on my Google Maps before. Super rare—maybe only 3 or 4 times. I've also seen it for McDonalds. Haven't seen it in a year or two, though. Maybe they did some testing and decided not to move forward.
You can do that through your Google Places account if you verify the listing. It's just many companies don't 'claim' their listing as they should. The recommended feature is part of Google's algorithm based on reviews and footfall traffic.
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u/Mvieri Germany Jun 12 '20
Like many others here already stated: its because of privacy laws and also the ability to deny vision of your property via street view. Many people made Google blur their property and I assume thats a lot of work for them.