I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the "New Maps" release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn't involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com/maps around that time, but I don't know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.
In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)
It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products.
I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well?
This is why I'm building https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place.
All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.
> It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products
The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy".
There are two forces at play here. One side wants privacy. When they give data to Google Calendar, they don't want Google Maps or Ads know about it. The other side (your opinion above) wants more integration between services.
In this political climate, the privacy side has an edge. This means if Google Photos want to access data on Google Calendar to provide the integration you asked above, they will have to jump through multiple quarters of privacy reviews, with a very high odd of being shutdown.
> All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market
After I see how the sausages are made, I think claims like these are naive. It's worth learning more about the factors at play before criticizing something. More often than not, the agents are acting pretty rationally based on the situation.
An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river
If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.
Innovation, oh my, sometimes it feels like the fat ones (and, by proxy, everyone else) are living in some alternate fantasy world where the mantra "you're not gonna need it" is taken to the extreme, so they're not even trying.
The pendulum should swing back to complex and more complicated interfaces sometime — but right now these are the dark times where, for example, Netflix, this huge, popular movie and show library, doesn't even have a way to find out exactly what movies with some actor or director it has available. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that.
Your project does look useful and on point though!
This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage.
As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.
> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me
And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.
Somehow DuckDuckGo has taken this to absurd extremes. Almost any search that doesn’t get many natural hits shows branches of my local government toward the bottom of the first page of results.
What we see is likely the attempt to squeeze even more juice from advertising over which Google virtually have a monopoly. Google is trying to continue its exponential growth while relying on selling advertisements. The market had already been saturated and optimised to crazy levels. Smart thing would be to expand to other sources of revenue, but other projects inside Google fail. As they are failing to compete internally for resources against that crazily optimised source of revenue.
It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.
It gets really annoying when you are trying to search for some specific term in English and google keep guessing that you wanted something that sounds similar in your native tongue.
I have links to google.com/maps in my IRC logs dating back from June 2014, so this absolutely tracks.
I actually remember google.com/maps being launched at IO in 2014 -- the presentation had a broken link in it for the new version of Maps, and a few of us DoS SRE watching the livestream were able to hack together a config change in a few minutes to fix it without waiting for a urlmap push :)
> It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users.
Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiative like this is/would be carried out. Would you imagine it as a buried lede or as a very transparent, explicit OKR?
It's easy to rationalize it as benefiting the users, so I'd imagine it's an explicit OKR, maybe even a few levels up in the org.
Like, one thing I've wanted on occasion is the ability to search for brick and mortar stores in a given radius who have the thing I want -- either because I want to physically inspect it before committing to a purchase or because for whatever reason the time/cost of shipping wouldn't be practical.
That sort of query is hard for Google to serve right now though for reasons including the lack of relevant location information in both the search results and the queries whose user behavior would help drive relevance rankings for those location-specific results.
Location information is a bit of a double-edged sword too though, even ignoring privacy concerns. I have to spoof my location and change my search language to get some results because of aggressive filtering happening behind the scenes. If a given query doesn't match Google's current understanding of the user then the right results existing in the corpus often won't imply that the user is able to find them with _any_ search operators.
With the document policy changes over the last 5 years, most decisions are now very opaque. Google TTLs everything except Docs and code history & reviews, at this point: emails, chats, bug reports, ...
There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time.
So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.
I remember the spiffy demo where the thumbnail in search results morphed into the full Maps UI without reloading.
But unification had started even earlier than that. Pretty much since Larry became CEO again, he pushed this mantra of "One Google", which brought the infamous Kennedy redesign across all services, as well as more of them available under the google.com host (e.g. maps as discussed here, but also flights and more). One of the ideas behind the latter was that you had to log into your Google account just once, which gradually made it all the way to YouTube(!). I vaguely recall other factors, such as compensating for the increased latency from going HTTPS everywhere, but also discussions about securing and hardening cookies.
As far as I know, google.com/maps has been around the entire time, but perhaps now it might be simply the canonical URL in a larger number of cases.
Funny, because there is a crummy form of Google maps present into he SERP, and it behaves completely differently from actual Google maps. It constantly annoys me, usually when searching for a business, that something that looks exactly like google maps, in Google, doesn't behave the same as google maps.
100%! I always ascribe it to some PM somewhere, but when I click on the "search maps" I would _love_ to be taken to the "real Google Maps".
The search maps is just a terrible experience, half implemented, doesn't do what I want, even down to little things.
My hack is to pick directions, which will get me to Google Maps, then cancel directions, this loses all state, but you're still in the location you want and can usually then just click the business you were looking for.
This reminds me of how Google integrated Maps into Calendar as a sidebar a while ago, a move that I absolutely hated. And instead of providing a preference setting to disable it, you have to “hide” the sidebar in a non-intuitive way [0]. I had to search to figure it out.
This is a fantastic example of motivated reasoning. This "change" (which apparently isn't even new) can have so many different reasons, some of which are less harmful and some of which are probably worse (privacy-wise) than the one mentioned here. There is no indication that re/mis-using permissions is specifically what they wanted to do here, there is also no example of them doing it right now. Don't get me wrong, there is also no evidence that this isn't the real reason and that they wouldn't do that in the future. But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.
1. The change does exist (although it apparently has been live for quite some time in some regions at least)
2. The change does have the effect of Google gaining more permissions (and subsequently more data) than previously
3. The author assumes that (2) is the (main) reason why (1) was done in the first place
Regardless of whether (3) is correct or completely wrong - and regardless of whether the author truly believes (3), or only uses it as a rhetorical trick to increase the controversy (and therefore the reach) of their post - both (1) and (2) remain fact.
And (2) is the actual problem here - regardless of whether it was done intentionally by Google or not.
> The change does have the effect of Google gaining more permissions (and subsequently more data)
There's a huge logic gap here. Obtaining more permissions doesn't at all imply obtaining more data when it's caused by an incidental change. Maybe the permissions aren't being used outside of the Maps context, or maybe it doesn't matter because the data was already be known.
It may not be the only reason, but you’re being too generous if you don’t think this was at least one of the reasons they did it.
Other than some abstract “branding” campaign, I cannot really see many other reasons why they would be doing this.
And as someone who worked in adtech in the past, it was very well known that Google used their domain as their tracking cookie domain as it’s nearly impossible for adblockers to just block without crippling other functionality. So they even have a history of using precisely these types of techniques.
> but you’re being too generous if you don’t think this was at least one of the reasons they did it
If you consider it absolutely unthinkable that it was not one of the reasons, it's you who is being too generous. Unconsidered side effects occur plentiful and all the time.
My default mode is to trust everyone until they break my trust. Now that I am old, I have realized that trusting everyone by default is not a good idea, especially big tech.
In cases like this, I think it is better to assume malice, even if we are proved wrong later. This is not our fault, this is big tech screwing with us repeatedly for years, with no shame or conscience
Even if it's entirely innocuous at present, that's still little better. It would signal modern-day Google engineers lack the nuanced understanding and user-first deliberation of their predecessors.
Given the breadth of services the company provides, a user ought to be able to restrict the permission to the scope of the maps tool.
bro, data is money and those corporates extract as much as they can. don't try to reason that google would not be interested in exactly that. one does not have to find a specific evidence for exactly this scenario in my opinion. this evidence likely might never emerge, while the spying definitely will happen. otherwise you would need to come up with a huge scenario where they actually farm a ton of benefits by doing this change, because a move like that you don't "just do for a better experience".
> But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.
That conclusion isn't wrong though. Your comment basically claims author is twisting facts but the conclusion remains that giving google.com/maps permission to geotrack does give google.com permission to geotrack.
"Pinky swear I won't enforce that clause" is not reassurance enough.
The real reason or intention isn't that important, compared to the outcomes of the change. The author correctly evaluated one of those outcomes and the respective implications.
Given Google's track record, I think it is a sensible evaluation of the situation.
When companies like Google are involved, I believe the Hanlon's Razor works in reverse. I.e. never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
I will accept motivated reasoning when in a friendly setting but big tech is not my friend. Their only and only purpose is to extract as much value (data or money) from me as possible.
Looking at Heartbleed and other famous security we should know that minor mistakes "disguised" as "typos" can have devastating effects.
The change may have happened for any of many reasons. Regardless of which reason was the motivator, it's clear impact is reducing user privacy. When talking about a tracking/advertising company, so it's kinda natural to assume that this was kept in mind.
Recently I have been trying to recover my gmail account. Besides sending verification code to my phone number, it also sent a code to YouTube app, high on the list. I have lost access to my google account, so I cannot open my YouTube. So it sent a verification code to the exact gmail address I am trying to recover. The whole process is unreal. This YouTube verification thing is definitely new, I don't know the motivation behind it, it couldn't even detect if my YouTube App was activate or not (or maybe it knows I wasn't using YouTube, maybe it is encouraging me to log in YouTube or open YouTube. Either way, I am not impressed.
Meta: my answer here is probably also a good example of motivated reasoning because I likely read a bit more into what the author wrote than is factually in the blog post. Oh boy.
> [...] though I'm sure they're just beginning to transfer their services to the main google.com domain.
This and the wording across the article imply more than the factual changes. But granted, hooby's comment above is probably more correct than what I wrote.
Are people really surprised when they hand their location off to a domain that any other part of the domain might have access to it? Like, taking away the technical specifics of how location allows actually works, you’ve given the data to the _company_. At the very least, they throw it on an internal service and allow other parts of the company’s infra to grab it.
The only conclusion this article made is that google now has the permission to-do so, and this is 100% correct - motivated or not. Although, given you overly defensive response makes me suspect you have more insight than we do..
I disagree on the former, but I agree on the later, technology is not a good substitute for consent.
Regarding the privacy:
If you are using a VPN to protect your privacy, then you are effectively transferring your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. The VPN provider is your new ISP. So you have to make sure you trust the VPN provider more than your ISP.
google.com/maps would result in a DNS request for google.com so anyone monitoring DNS would know they are connecting to a google service but wouldn't know which one.
maps.google.com would result in a DNS request that show they are connecting to maps.google.com and could presume they want some maps.
DoH (and ESNI on the server side) would fix it, but iirc Chrome (the most used browser) doesn't use DoH by default.
As others have noticed, this is not a new move. For the past several years I've been accessing Google Maps simply by typing in maps.google.com and it has always redirected me to google.com/maps.
Even more confusing and a regular cause of annoyance for me that's been ongoing for a while now is there's like a knockoff version of Google Maps built into Google search that it'll kick you into if you click a map from search results. e.g. you type "gyms near me" and it shows you a map in the search results, and you click it to expand. It's still at the google.com/search domain and while you can zoom and pan around, there doesn't seem to be a way to arbitrarily jump into street view wherever you want, which I frequently want to do.
I'm constantly ending up in this view, fighting with it before remembering I need to go to real Google Maps and do my search again.
Same. It's so annoying and I feel like they do not always include the relevant info like the URL in that mode. Though looking now I did not find examples of that.
Funny, for me it’s the opposite. I always try to use the web view, and there’s an annoying pop up that redirects me to download Google maps. When I switch back into the web browser to go back to the web view, it auto redirects me to the app download again. Super annoying.
Yeah, but do you want to bet that during the management call and the subsequent engineering call that made this decision, the main topic of discussion was the direct financial benefit from improved tracking?
We'll never know, but if we could find out, say 1 year from now, I'd bet 100:1 that was the main driver.
I actually find that somewhat reassuring, similarly to a Google employee criticising the security practices of a Google-operated certificate authority in public[1]: it demonstrates that the team responsible for instituting security policies in the interest of users still has some autonomy.
thought they have moved mail.google.com to google.com/mail a while ago. Tracking would still be possible over 2 domain, but then google would have to do a bit of ETL operations. Guess this will save some more engineering.
Genuine question. Is it reasonable as a user to expect data collected by Google via maps.google.com to not be shared with other Google applications e.g. mail.google.com?
I'd have thought data collected on any of their domains would be meshed/merged behind the scenes where it suits them to do so?
I think the concern is less about other Google businesses having access to maps data as you suggest.
It’s more about the fact that using non map Google services on google.com will not prompt asking for location service permissions, if they’ve been granted when prompted on google.com/maps already.
Users may not want location to be collected for searches, but are okay with the privacy tradeoff for it being collected when using maps.
I think the concern is more about when Google is able to collect said data, not whether it's shared or not.
I don't have location enabled for Google maps in the browser, but if I did, then presumably Google could collect that data also when I'm just searching for a website.
They can already join your activity across everything. This is about access and collection. So if they move store.google.com to google.com/store, they will have access to all browser permissions you gave google.com/maps or google.com/flights.
I'm ok with sharing my location with maps (and therefore google) WHILE USING MAPS.
Not when I'm reading my emails, or searching for something on the web.
It could be tricky with permissions on different users: for instance you authorize google.com/maps to track your location while logged as user A.
You logout and switch to user B to look at another Google service, but google.com is still allowed to get your location, and will stick it to user B, which is something you might not have wanted. This didn't happen with the previous domains, so could be a surprise.
Oh having though about it I agree, I just think we're probably a minority.
As others have pointed out the line has been blurred between search and maps so far that maps has search embedded, and search has maps embedded. A lot users of Google search likely expect results to be location aware without realising what privacy has been eroded to enable that.
Applications are not juridical entities, so at the absolute best it is debatable.
Most probable version is that they share as much data as their internal regulations say, or a bit more. They definitely have some form of internal regs on this, for basic security hygiene, but they write it.
FWIW, there's an EU regulation coming that prevents companies from using data necessary for a product (like maps) to be used to improve a different product (like search).
I'd be interested to find out whether this works as intended. There's a good argument that maps is a subset of search. Most people don't open Google maps just to look at a map, they search the map for a place.
I suspect this may more be to do with large organisations (and equally foreign governments) wanting to block Google translate, since it can be used as a proxy in some cases.
Readit News
In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)
I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well?
This is why I'm building https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place.
All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.
The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy".
There are two forces at play here. One side wants privacy. When they give data to Google Calendar, they don't want Google Maps or Ads know about it. The other side (your opinion above) wants more integration between services.
In this political climate, the privacy side has an edge. This means if Google Photos want to access data on Google Calendar to provide the integration you asked above, they will have to jump through multiple quarters of privacy reviews, with a very high odd of being shutdown.
> All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market
After I see how the sausages are made, I think claims like these are naive. It's worth learning more about the factors at play before criticizing something. More often than not, the agents are acting pretty rationally based on the situation.
If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.
The pendulum should swing back to complex and more complicated interfaces sometime — but right now these are the dark times where, for example, Netflix, this huge, popular movie and show library, doesn't even have a way to find out exactly what movies with some actor or director it has available. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that.
Your project does look useful and on point though!
Dead Comment
As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.
And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.
It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.
Only when you're using a phone? Only if you're not at home? What if you want to find out what a bakery is?
(Apologies for rapid fire, I'm not having a go at you, just curious)
I actually remember google.com/maps being launched at IO in 2014 -- the presentation had a broken link in it for the new version of Maps, and a few of us DoS SRE watching the livestream were able to hack together a config change in a few minutes to fix it without waiting for a urlmap push :)
Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiative like this is/would be carried out. Would you imagine it as a buried lede or as a very transparent, explicit OKR?
Like, one thing I've wanted on occasion is the ability to search for brick and mortar stores in a given radius who have the thing I want -- either because I want to physically inspect it before committing to a purchase or because for whatever reason the time/cost of shipping wouldn't be practical.
That sort of query is hard for Google to serve right now though for reasons including the lack of relevant location information in both the search results and the queries whose user behavior would help drive relevance rankings for those location-specific results.
Location information is a bit of a double-edged sword too though, even ignoring privacy concerns. I have to spoof my location and change my search language to get some results because of aggressive filtering happening behind the scenes. If a given query doesn't match Google's current understanding of the user then the right results existing in the corpus often won't imply that the user is able to find them with _any_ search operators.
There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time.
So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.
But unification had started even earlier than that. Pretty much since Larry became CEO again, he pushed this mantra of "One Google", which brought the infamous Kennedy redesign across all services, as well as more of them available under the google.com host (e.g. maps as discussed here, but also flights and more). One of the ideas behind the latter was that you had to log into your Google account just once, which gradually made it all the way to YouTube(!). I vaguely recall other factors, such as compensating for the increased latency from going HTTPS everywhere, but also discussions about securing and hardening cookies.
As far as I know, google.com/maps has been around the entire time, but perhaps now it might be simply the canonical URL in a larger number of cases.
The search maps is just a terrible experience, half implemented, doesn't do what I want, even down to little things.
My hack is to pick directions, which will get me to Google Maps, then cancel directions, this loses all state, but you're still in the location you want and can usually then just click the business you were looking for.
0: https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar...
2. The change does have the effect of Google gaining more permissions (and subsequently more data) than previously
3. The author assumes that (2) is the (main) reason why (1) was done in the first place
Regardless of whether (3) is correct or completely wrong - and regardless of whether the author truly believes (3), or only uses it as a rhetorical trick to increase the controversy (and therefore the reach) of their post - both (1) and (2) remain fact.
And (2) is the actual problem here - regardless of whether it was done intentionally by Google or not.
Pretty sure I’ve been experiencing this change for many years at this point.
There's a huge logic gap here. Obtaining more permissions doesn't at all imply obtaining more data when it's caused by an incidental change. Maybe the permissions aren't being used outside of the Maps context, or maybe it doesn't matter because the data was already be known.
Other than some abstract “branding” campaign, I cannot really see many other reasons why they would be doing this.
And as someone who worked in adtech in the past, it was very well known that Google used their domain as their tracking cookie domain as it’s nearly impossible for adblockers to just block without crippling other functionality. So they even have a history of using precisely these types of techniques.
If you consider it absolutely unthinkable that it was not one of the reasons, it's you who is being too generous. Unconsidered side effects occur plentiful and all the time.
In cases like this, I think it is better to assume malice, even if we are proved wrong later. This is not our fault, this is big tech screwing with us repeatedly for years, with no shame or conscience
Given the breadth of services the company provides, a user ought to be able to restrict the permission to the scope of the maps tool.
That conclusion isn't wrong though. Your comment basically claims author is twisting facts but the conclusion remains that giving google.com/maps permission to geotrack does give google.com permission to geotrack.
"Pinky swear I won't enforce that clause" is not reassurance enough.
Given Google's track record, I think it is a sensible evaluation of the situation.
Looking at Heartbleed and other famous security we should know that minor mistakes "disguised" as "typos" can have devastating effects.
They know what theyre doing alright.
Do you mind pointing out where you think this applies?
Did we read the same short article? [not parody]
It's so short, we can copy paste it here and then you can point out where he reasoned that Google did this with intent to track.
> But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.
OP is simply stating a consequence of this change!
"Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services."
This and the wording across the article imply more than the factual changes. But granted, hooby's comment above is probably more correct than what I wrote.
Using google.com/XXX for all its services protect the user from being spied by external actors such as ISP because everything is hidden behind HTTPS.
Whereas, with XXX.google.com, external actors knows that you are using service XXX.
Regarding the privacy:
If you are using a VPN to protect your privacy, then you are effectively transferring your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. The VPN provider is your new ISP. So you have to make sure you trust the VPN provider more than your ISP.
As other mentioned, OSM is an alternative (not equivalent) of Google Maps.
google.com/maps would result in a DNS request for google.com so anyone monitoring DNS would know they are connecting to a google service but wouldn't know which one.
maps.google.com would result in a DNS request that show they are connecting to maps.google.com and could presume they want some maps.
DoH (and ESNI on the server side) would fix it, but iirc Chrome (the most used browser) doesn't use DoH by default.
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I'm constantly ending up in this view, fighting with it before remembering I need to go to real Google Maps and do my search again.
We'll never know, but if we could find out, say 1 year from now, I'd bet 100:1 that was the main driver.
[1] e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709223#c19
I'd have thought data collected on any of their domains would be meshed/merged behind the scenes where it suits them to do so?
It’s more about the fact that using non map Google services on google.com will not prompt asking for location service permissions, if they’ve been granted when prompted on google.com/maps already.
Users may not want location to be collected for searches, but are okay with the privacy tradeoff for it being collected when using maps.
I don't have location enabled for Google maps in the browser, but if I did, then presumably Google could collect that data also when I'm just searching for a website.
- is it reasonable for a user to expect that Google will collect all bits of information about them, because Google isn't prevented from doing that?
or
- is it reasonable for a society to allow Google (and competitors) to do this?
I think the answers are respectively yes and no.
But now google.com will know where he is when he browses it, not just when he uses Google Maps.
You logout and switch to user B to look at another Google service, but google.com is still allowed to get your location, and will stick it to user B, which is something you might not have wanted. This didn't happen with the previous domains, so could be a surprise.
As others have pointed out the line has been blurred between search and maps so far that maps has search embedded, and search has maps embedded. A lot users of Google search likely expect results to be location aware without realising what privacy has been eroded to enable that.
Most probable version is that they share as much data as their internal regulations say, or a bit more. They definitely have some form of internal regs on this, for basic security hygiene, but they write it.
And when they worked, the domain was translate.google.cn instead.