I’d be curious about what the caselaw looks like.
It being possible to follow your cellphone off a bridge is recent-ish; but bad maps causing some combination of economic and physical injury seems like something that could, and probably did, start happing from time to time not long after the invention of enough cartography for people to be following maps; and even if there’s not a solid body of map law a map seems like it could be readily analogous to other compilations-of-facts-for-reference that could lead to lethal errors if followed too closely; with room for back and forth about the duty of the producer to be correct vs. the duty of the user to be prudent and whether certain classes of reference material are held to a higher standard than others for some reason.
From a cursory review it looks like team GIS has been fretting about the problem since at least the 80s; and their analysis suggests another couple of wrinkles: under some circumstances state and private producers of maps and charts may have different liability for the accuracy of what they produce; and apparently torts can behave differently depending on whether the reference material is classified as a product or as a service or a hybrid; so you’ve got potential layers based on who generated the data that google is serving up; and I do not profess to understand the abstruse analysis of angels on the heads of pins that determines whether maintaining a database is providing a service or actually being engaged in the sale of a product.
