Someone in my family was briefly obsessed with the idea that Google had a habit of gathering information by treating its own users as guinea pigs. Sending users on routes that would help Google gather traffic flow information, rather than routes that made the best use of users' time.

As far as I know, that was an internet rumor, not the result of evidence or investigation. But it's the kind of allegation that's pretty much impossible to disprove.

Google Maps have gotten quite a lot worse over tgr last few years. I have tried various alternatives but none function properly. Live traffic routing is a big problem for alternatives. I have tried Magic Earth and Nunav but had to revert back to Google Maps in both cases.

Or, it's faster but you need to zigzag through residential streets and eventually make dangerous left turns into traffic without a light or stop sign to stop the heavy traffic in both directions.

Oops, it took too long to turn so it's no longer faster-- why didn't you just stay in the main boulevard? Silly human.

Always check no tolls. It'll always recommend the toll, unless there is an accident or major traffic disruption, even if it only saves 1 min. Rarely are tolls worth it outside peak hour.

For some reason? We don't live in a star trek like utopia. This is exactly how this technology is supposed to work in a capitalist society.

Just imagine when you are in a self driving car you will have no choice at all.

You could be moved through multiple toll roads. Or which toll owner is the highest bidder. Google knows everything about you through your.data. if you are poor you will be routed out of the way or into parking lot like traffic while other roads are kept clear for the affluent.

People talking about self-driving cars and the need to solve the trolley problem are out of touch with reality. The trolley problem is solved. The richest person in the accident will always survive. And that is easily determined by your data.

This is the world we live in and how the tech will be used. It's the same issue with the"AI is just a tool" folks.

A knife is just a tool too. But would you want to live in a world where all the knives are owned solely by socio paths that have all the power in society?

Yeah, but it brings you past this commercial zone where a number of chains and franchises pay Google a lot of advertising money.

Google maps has taken to routing me onto unsafe roads for walking and biking instead of available trails which are 1000x safer. They removed the "beta" marker long ago but it was shit like that they were concerned about getting sued for. Instead of focusing on fixing shit like that they were busy monetizing and only removed the beta marker once they realized they were legally invincible.

So many here are so happily accepting the very concept of a toll road, it's kind of gross.

Every time I have to open that piece of shit I end up screaming at it, screaming!

The most generous guess is that it is doing some exploratory investigation of how long the other paths are currently taking. For any navigation app to be very accurate for most users, it needs to be very inaccurate for some users. It won't know that taking this 30 minute detour is worth taking without someone taking that detour and another person sitting through the traffic that made the detour worthwhile. And since traffic changes over time, it would need to continually do that exploration.

Though it wouldn't surprise me if that's not the only factor and that there's some enshitification going on on top of this. One guess in that angle: a special secret VIP mode where people who have given Google a lot of money get people directed away from their route.

In any case, alternate routes are only faster for the first three people who use them. After that you are no worse off in the first traffic jam than in the alternate traffic jam.

In the area where I live, Google Maps has a huge highway fetish and often it is more relaxing to take the smaller roads.

Do people actually read books like that?

Every time I visit my family in Wales Google tries to take me away from the perfectly reliable A55 and onto some ungodly assemblage of extremely narrow country roads and tenuous mountain passes. Sometimes it offers them to me but I've caught it secretly changing my precalculated route without my input. Unfortunately I've tried several alternatives (various osm apps, here wego) and the only real alternative is Waze... which is owned by Google. We are nothing but cattle to them. I think Google is trying to kill me.

We call that waze

Ive been given routes miles out of my way because google wants to put me on the turnpike.

You can turn off all those settings though, one of the few things Google still does right.