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Well, Google has the most popular OS. Tomtom is not far from being the OS of lots of cars. Here, too. It's owned by Daimler/BMW/Audi (sold for 3 billions). Apple has the second most used mobile OS.

So yes, for these huge actors, it's quite easy to create congestion data.

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The vast majority of POI churn information comes from streetview + machine learning object detection + automatic change detection + human verification. There are many clever algorithms in play through the entire pipeline. As moats go, its probably bigger than search.
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You forgot the massive user base of Google. Users through comments are the first to tell Google that the POI changed. And shop owners are often the first users to worry.
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