Comment on Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon
catloaf@lemm.ee 6 months agoNiantic is a Google spinoff, and the data they generated for Ingress was used for Google Maps. I’m surprised they don’t have a special deal with Google.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Google doesn’t own most of their map data - they license it off other companies that have spent decades and billions of dollars collecting map data from all around the world.
So even if Google gives a project a “special deal” it’s still not going to be free. Open Street Map, on the other hand, is totally free. And in some ways it’s better than Google Maps — because it has millions of people contributing to the map. No commercial mapping company can come close to that.