Does the company that owns your navigation app have to remember every route you've ever taken forever? Does it need to do meta analysis on your location data to figure out where you likely work and life and where your friend are? Does it need to sell that data to law enforcement and businesses so they can track your movements and pattern match your behaviors?

Seems to me there's a huge gulf between "location app knows where you are" and "we have used that to collect every scrap of information about your movements everywhere you go and weaponized that information against you"

There’s a cost, it’s just not in dollars.

I don't have sharp rhetoric for it, but I could find bipartisanship with right-wingers if they apply the "big government giving you welfare means they can take it away from you" to free web services.

OpenStreetMap is always behind on business data, but it has data that Google doesn't have, and it can't be taken away near as easily. And requires no account at all.

Is it? You are doing labor (usage) that harms yourself (brain damage). The fact that google makes money isn't irrelevant, it's the whole point.

I assume it’s some extreme take based on the speculation that outsourcing thinking to LLMs makes people dumber.