
Data to Money: How Much Does Google Owe You? - vinchuco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8kA-EZReA0
======
BoorishBears
How much money do I owe Google? How much would a company charge for the same
services as Google if data wasn't a source of income?

Some of their services I could see being free/cheap and still almost as good.
Like Gmail for example.

But stuff like Google Maps? Things that leverage all that data to do things no
one else can? I'm not even sure someone else could do it as well without all
that data, let alone do it for free.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Some of their services I could see being free/cheap and still almost as
> good. Like Gmail for example.

Fastmail is pretty damn good and keeps getting better. I still use Gmail
exclusively, but _pay Fastmail an annual fee to hedge my bets and support an
alternative_. If Fastmail was to support multiple labels on a message, I would
move tomorrow. That's the only thing holding me and my 9GB of mail history
back.

> But stuff like Google Maps? Things that leverage all that data to do things
> no one else can? I'm not even sure someone else could do it as well without
> all that data, let alone do it for free.

OpenStreetMap? And now there's OpenStreetView [1].

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparision_Google_servic...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparision_Google_services_-
_OSM)

[http://searchengineland.com/founder-openstreetmap-good-
bette...](http://searchengineland.com/founder-openstreetmap-good-better-
google-maps-already-192089)

[1] [http://openstreetview.org/](http://openstreetview.org/)

~~~
BoorishBears
Gmail was an example what I did think people could do for free/cheap.

OSM isn't close to what Google Maps is, Google Maps is OSM+realtime traffic
detection+Realtime transit integration+realtime Uber integeration+tracking
municipal detours+a million other small things.

I highly doubt any free project will ever be able to replicate the insanely
extensive feature set Google Maps provides (half of them probably aren't even
outward facing but improve direction data). The tracking aspect alone takes
tracking device GPS data.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You're entitled to your opinion!

------
x13
1\. The irony of this being on youtube

2\. a gov-regulated repo of data.. seems horrible for privacy

