Google greenwashing what is clearly a demonstration of its power to redirect flows of people at a whim. I wonder what other purposes such redirections could be used for?
Only recently Google been caught degrading UX of Firefox, capturing web standards, pushing AMP and Chrome Manifest v3, making Android less open source with every release and locking it down with SafetyNet, etc. I'm not even going to tell about all dead services, APIs, permanent account-wide bans and non-existent tech support.
Do you expect people to believe in their good will?
Imagine Google cancelling you. Like by permanently banning your every account for no reason without chance to appeal. Or better cancelling your whole company by banning Ads, Google Play or GCP account. Everything is gone in one second, poof and no one can help you unless you somehow get to HN or reddit frontpage.
The fact that it is an immense and heterogeneous organization with many different decision-makers at all levels with varying priorities and intentions. Essentializing Google as a singular agent obscures this perspective and gives no credence to those who are trying to push it in better directions from the inside.
Anything like a major PR campaign is approved at the highest levels.
EDIT: I'd also note that in the book Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff discusses how Pokemon Go was seen in investor circles as a successful demonstration of manipulating masses of people to go to commercial spaces by luring them with imaginary characters. This sent market caps soaring. When I saw this headline, I immediately thought that this is them doing that with maps, but in a PR friendly way.
And how is any of this a new concern? This issue existed long before these new features and will continue to be a threat long after. I really don't see how this is comparable considering they could just as easily have done the same without greenwashing.
Other purposes? It's easy! You can make people avoid businesses that didn't paid to you and make them drive close to fastfood that wanted advertising. Or you can drive people around some political protests...
I'm sorry, this is is dangerously close to conspiracy theory territory. I am by no means, an apologist for Google, but I seriously doubt they have the ability/resources, or even motivation to manage route planning at such a microscopic level.
I recognize that they have been caught with their pants down with things like altering search results [1], but making broad speculative claims like this about the real world without any substantiation whatsoever is unfair and alarmist.
My bad. I guess I really should've made it clear enough that I not suggest there is some conspiracy going on. I just replied with few ideas on how this can be used in more of black mirror scenario.
Is it really a conspiracy theory that all they'd have to do is tweak the weights in dijkstra's algorithm based on who pays them?
Alleging that they're actually doing that is one thing, but simply recognizing that they can do it and have a potential incentive is another and I think that is clear.
I would still find it very ironic if Google would actually try to affect real world businesses that way. After all racketeering of online companies is why US ISPs wanted to repeal net neutrality so much.
