Google’s closely guarded “Ground Truth” project, initiated in 2008 but only publicly revealed just four months after the FCC report in 2012, exemplifies the point. Ground Truth is the “deep map” that contains the detailed “logic of places”: walking paths, goldfish ponds, highway on-ramps, traffic conditions, ferry lines, parks, campuses, neighborhoods, buildings, and more. Getting these details right is a source of competitive advantage in the contest for behavioral surplus accrued from mobile devices. The construction of the deep map draws on public resources such as geographic databases from the US Census Bureau and the US Geological Survey, but what distinguishes Google’s maps from all others is the integration of its exclusive proprietary data from Street View. In other words, data compiled through public investments are augmented with data taken from a unilateral transfer of surplus behavior and decision rights. The composite results are then reclassified as private assets.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 473