– [Narrator] If you need to get somewhere, let's say a new building, put it into Maps and Google
gives you a route in seconds. But behind that seemingly simple answer is a complex system of
data collected from users, satellites, cars, even camels. Today, more than 1 billion people use Google Maps every month. And in 17 years, it's evolved
from a desktop application to a massive mobile platform that continuously updates
information about a location. – We have over 150 million
people around the world that are contributing information, with 50 million updates a day
coming from the community, from the public sector. So think of the map as being alive. – [Narrator] But the
amount of data it collects has also attracted criticism
from privacy experts. Here's how in Google's
quest to remap the world it had to revolutionize the
technology we're used to seeing.
This is the tech behind Google Maps. – You can search for a place, like an address, an
intersection, almost anything. – [Narrator] When it
comes to digital mapping, Google wasn't the first on
the scene, or even the second. But when Maps launched in the mid 2000s, it had technology many
people had never seen before. – I remember the day
that Google Maps launched with satellite imagery in the browser. Everybody just went and
looked at their own house. – [Narrator] Craig is a professor in the department of geography
at Hofstra University who studies data driven geotechnology. – No one had ever seen their
own house in satellite imagery, much less in color
satellite imagery before. This was a new view on the world. – [Narrator] Maps'
success was partly due to acquisitions it made early on, like Where 2 Technologies and Keyhole, that made mapping more
accessible to consumers. – By buying Keyhole, they got the software that it took to have a easy, ready to use, satellite image reviewer
on a global scale. Where 2 Technologies provided them a much better user interface
than was available elsewhere.
And by combining those with just the sheer amount of capital at Google, allowed them to spend in ways
and develop those further that you didn't see before. – [Narrator] Maps
expanded its tech quickly, opening it up to developers,
integrating street view and launching Android
and iOS apps early on. But how exactly did all
of this come together to get you from point A to point B? Christopher Phillips, the current head of Google's geo division, gave us an inside look
on the Google campus. – The foundational piece was
to have a real world model, the digital truth of what's
going on in the real world, including where streets are. – [Narrator] Let's take
a look at a real route in San Francisco that
Chris walked us through. – [Christopher] Let's say
I'm in the San Francisco fairy building, the farmer's market, and I need to get to San
Francisco International Airport.
– [Narrator] To get that real world model Chris was talking about, Google starts with
satellite and aerial imagery to create an accurate map. This is layered together
with data from street view. To do this, they use a
process called photogrammetry. Using this and GPS data, they can pinpoint the right coordinates for the image. If we take a quick detour
off our route to France, you can see what the
layering process looks like using the Arc de Triomphe. – Think of it as a big jigsaw puzzle where we can put these images together. And we understand the
distance between images and where they sit with
the actual location, the GPS location. – [Narrator] Google keeps
a range of the cameras that have been used over
time to capture imagery at the street view garage
on its campus in California. – It all started with a 500 pound camera that was forklift onto a van.
– [Narrator] You may have
seen a street view car at some point, with a 360 degree camera on top. Some versions are equipped
with LIDAR sensors which measure the distance from the camera to objects around it. They're also equipped with GPS
to get an accurate location for exactly where the
camera is positioned. But to reach more remote places, they've adapted cameras
to fit the terrain. Google has put cameras on backpacks to get to places that cars can't go.
They've also used transportation
like bikes and snowmobiles. In some rarer cases,
Google has gotten images from camels, divers and even astronauts. Their newest camera can
be detached from cars to be carried around. – We graduate to our most recent, which is a 15 pound, very lightweight, and that can be powered off of a phone, versus a large computing
unit that's in the car. – [Narrator] This imagery
isn't just for looking at. It actually helps keep
their maps up to date, by detecting changes since the
last time images were taken.
– We are not just capturing
what a place looks like but we can detect that a
business might have changed. We can detect new signs. There's now a stop sign here,
or a traffic light here. So understanding new physical
attributes of the real world is what we've been able to derive. – [Narrator] Once they have
all the information they need to figure out what the map looks like, Google layers on info about
traffic, route and businesses. To do this, they get data
from local municipalities, public bus and train schedules
and businesses themselves. This is footage from 2013 of the software Google still uses to edit maps.
A combination of machine
learning and map operators edit the public data like road networks, to match exactly what you
see on the layered imagery. Since 2013, Google says they've been able to automate most of this process. So for Chris's route from San
Francisco's ferry building to the airport… – [Christopher] Right now, I can see that it's gonna take 21 minutes. – [Narrator] In order to predict how long it takes to get somewhere
or how busy a place is, Google relies on reviews,
contributed information and anonymized location data, and uses algorithms to comb through historical traffic patterns. It looks at current trends based
on your anonymous location, aggregated with millions of other users. – So we can overlay the trend
with the current activity to then create a prediction. – [Narrator] The company also
uses your approximate location and its mapping tools to target ads and advertise businesses, which is one of the ways
the platform makes money. – We have the ability for businesses to actually promote themselves on the map. So whether you're searching
for a place to go, and if it's relevant to the
people who are in that area, we can show that as one of the results.
– So far, Google has mapped more than 250 countries and territories, but as it's added more data and ingrained itself in
our lives and culture, users and regulators have pushed back and demanded guardrails. – Privacy is a big issue with any kind of geographic technology. And Google maps is only so much more so because Google Maps is down to
an individual street address down to individual people
when we connect it to things like your Gmail account or your
wallet or your wifi network. – [Narrator] Google has been criticized, and in some cases taken to court, for things like the amount
of data it collects, street view images
showing private property and grabbing data from
unsecured wifi networks with street view cars. Google says the data from you that it uses to inform traffic and
busyness is anonymized.
– We use a technology treatment
called differential privacy. Differential privacy
allows us to separate you and your activity from what we aggregate from millions of people as signals to derive insights around like busyness and how long the walk
or the drive may take. – [Narrator] But some data that is used to tailor your personal map, like noting that you've been
to a location before, isn't. They say that that data is not sold or shared with third parties. Google also says that it
gives users privacy controls like toggling location history on or off, searching in incognito mode and
auto deleting location data. – We're always improving how
we manage the information we capture to protect people's privacy and make sure that we only have
the critical amount of data to help power the most useful products.
– [Narrator] With its
advances in technology, its advertising priorities,
and even its criticism, Google Maps has helped change
the way we navigate the world. – The biggest improvement
that Google Maps has made is making geographic
information much more accessible to a very large number of people. The biggest downside, there's some thing paying much closer
attention to the intricacies of every movement you make
when you carry your phone. – [Narrator] Google
says the future of Maps aims to be more
comprehensive and immersive. – We're taking technology
where we can combine and fuse together satellite
imagery, aerial imagery, street view imagery, user contribution, to create a photorealistic view of what it might feel
like to check out a park. What's the vibe of it? What's the vibe of it on a different day? – [Narrator] Immersive
view is Google's next step in using their database of information and imagery to map the world..
