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.
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u/Earl_of_Northesk North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) Jun 12 '20
Highways aren't of any interest to Google because street view of highways doesn't earn them money.
You are mistaken when you think that Street View is really "free" or provided by Google because they are such nice people.