> What really put salt in the wound, though, was the fact that it appeared Google had stolen our user data for their own places product. That's right, they actually took our information that we had painstakingly collected, cleaned, and verified (we had our own call center and would take updates from customers) and passed it off as their own.

The exact same thing happened to the company I worked for, which was active in the online local business market (i.e. putting small and medium businessed up on the map, with descriptions, ratings and everything). I was in charge of Information Retrieval, as in half of the data was collected by my colleagues physically going from door to door and collecting info, and the other half was inserted by me in the DB from a set of diverse publicly available data (mostly some Excel files collected from the ministries' websites and formatted by me for SQL INSERTs). Not a year passes and Google Places is launched, and another couple of months later almost all of our businesses are in there, with errors and all. At least they didn't take us out of their SERPS, they figured we were too small for them to really matter (Eastern-European country). At least I'm happy I'm not paranoid, I had thought about this ever since my company was forced to exit that business space.