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Notes -
It’s worth noting that if the goal of affirmative action is genuinely to help black people, then encouraging traffic at black owned businesses is probably the most bang for your buck way to do that, even after accounting for that many, eg, beauty salons are segregated for normal and natural reasons. Black communities do have an actual problem where Koreans, Arabs, and Indians own most of the businesses in them, and the profits generated are exported from the community.
Google’s method might be dumb here- and probably is- but the basic thought isn’t.
For this specific case, this is almost certainly true. Google most certainly has the ability to track if this leads to an increase in traffic to black owned businesses(after all, the majority of people who navigate through google maps do so by clicking on an icon, and it's pretty easy to track traffic to a particular place that way, or at least I'd think so). They also probably don't want to, because that opens up the possibility that they could be wrong about it, and these kinds of woke initiative usually don't want to entertain the idea that they don't work.
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Maps has a reasonably large footprint if only because of android install base. Many people use default apps so for iPhone users the data'd mostly be from TomTom and for android users it'd be mostly Google. Waze is amusingly a google subsidiary so people using that are also using Google maps data. Google maps used to be more common in third party applications but they changed something in the licensing so in the past five years or so I've more often seen Bing (which is also powered by TomTom). (And by "often seen" I mean the small time developers using their dev licenses in their production applications then getting cut-off by whatever service they failed to pay for and instead of a map you see tiled images of "Pay for a license, signed by $Company". Google just overlays the nag notice over low-resolution maps, Bing makes it white squares.)
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