GPS has made a major impact on our world. How is it a free service that anyone with a phone can access? How is it profitable for companies to offer services like navigation without subscription fees or ads?
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The US military created it, and the signals were out there. Reagan ordered it opened up to civilians after Korean Air Flight 007 was shot down over bad navigation data, and things got affordable to regular consumers over the last 15 years.
Now, those satellites only tell you your coordinates. Map data is where the money is, and the big providers have spent millions and millions to get it built out. Which means recouping that requires either slipping in promoted search results, using your location data to add to ad profiles, pricing it in somewhere else, or using it as a loss leader to encourage use of other services.
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