- [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.