The “insane conspiracy theory” is not that an ad network did everything it could to scrape more data for ads, lol. The insane conspiracy theory is that the ad n

The “insane conspiracy theory” is not that an ad network did everything it could to scrape more data for ads, lol. The insane conspiracy theory is that the ad network decided to photograph people’s property because it’s a nice thing to do. There’s obviously all sorts of data that wardriving can pick up that none of those services could (even if they existed at the time, which most didn’t). And obviously you or I have no clue what the data was used for. My guess is that, being a business, they used it for their core business, and your guess is that they spent exorbitant amounts of money to accumulate their pot of gold for… well no gosh darn reason. Now that Android exists, Google has pretty good reason to continue investing in mapping. But let’s keep in mind that Android also only exists to power the revenue-generating part of the business (ads). This isn’t a critique of Google, this is how businesses work.