Neither of those changes would leave the data in much of a state to improve the product. For example, the fine-grained location data is fed back into flow-analy

Neither of those changes would leave the data in much of a state to improve the product. For example, the fine-grained location data is fed back into flow-analysis to determine if there's a traffic jam on roads that aren't monitored by other systems (like highway traffic counters). https://www.ncta.com/platform/broadband-internet/how-google-tracks-traffic/ https://www.ncta.com/platform/broadband-internet/how-google-... This sort of data cross-pollination is done all over the place in the Google software ecosystem. It's not that it's easier to collect the data than not; it's that Google software literally wouldn't be as effective without the massive amounts of data it has access to analyze across use cases.