Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google maps and Apple maps traffic is cross sourced anonymously too
Interesting, so you're suggesting that the Google and Apple navigation apps are also crowd-sourced social networks like Waze? If that's true I wonder why Waze is singled out for these types of articles.
AFAIK, this is not really accurate; Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze often pick different routes between the same two points at the same time of day in my (admittedly informal) experiments. Google and Apple pretty consistently favored major roads unless there were serious traffic backups on them, while during anything remotely resembling commuting hour, Waze was frequently acting like your crazy uncle who swears taking 28 residential roads, two of which are unpaved and the last of which is an alleyway that ends in an unprotected left turn across three lanes of dense traffic, is clearly the best route.
(And while that's an exaggeration, Waze has consistently been far more likely to send me down unpaved roads, ridiculously steep hills, and, yes, unprotected left turns onto busy highways, presumably because the residential road I was on was lower traffic than the parallel road one block away with traffic lights.)