262
Why people don't talk about Google Maps' privacy issues
(www.youtube.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
262 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
32656 readers
219 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
For those unaware, Organic Maps (uses OSM) is really good! It's good for 90% of all ur navigation needs. For the rest 10%, there's no good alternative to google maps unfortunately.
Like there's no open source project with commercial paid licence ?
Nothing competes with osmand for hiking or cycling.
Traffic updates aren't exactly a problem for me as I travel everywhere using my bicycle/public transit.
The only problem I face is that I can't get public transit information on OSM. Now ideally the city should be the one making this information accessible. Unfortunately for me, I currently live in a shitty city (although not for long). Therefore, within a matter of months, Organic would meet almost 100% of my navigation needs.
pretty sure organic is working on that, I remember there being docs on building with PT data.
My issue with these is that my use case is public transport, for that it seems like GMaps is still unbeatable, i hope to find an alternative as good or better based on OSM soon because it's the one tool i still have no alternative to
Where are you from? Where I live (in the Netherlands) there's an official tool from the public transport services which works just as well as gmaps to plan your train/tram/metro/bus journey.
Same same. This is a problem in shithole cities. Good cities have their own transit apps (which are like Uber for public transit).
Out of curiosity, any examples? I know for NYC people use Citymapper, but that's available for most big cities.
Calgary, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, etc.
If you're American, some of them support transit now. I have Magic Earth and it supports it in most major metro areas (and even my dinky little city I believe lol)
I think 5 out of that 10% is supplemented by OsmAnd. But it does not have public transport schedules and traffic data.
Traffic data? ~~If a grandmother had a penis, she would be a grandfather~~ To implement this function, Osmand should gather location data from every user.
There are often individual apps for various cities and transport organizations.
Traffic has always been a mixed bag. Yeah it's nice to be able to see that street A is more busy than street B. But so can everybody else, and they're all going to use street B now.
Meh, I find most people don't even bother.
I use secondary routes 90% of the time by default, because they're just as fast with less mental effort and less risk.
Why go with all the lemmings?
Wow, organic maps is really nice, seems like a much cleaner user interface than OsmAnd, whereas OsmAnd has more options.
What are the rest 10%?
Reviews most definitely. Hard to beat that
I'm glad I came back to this thread. Would never have heard of this!
I genuinely don't understand how anyone can believe this, I keep trying it over and over and over and it fails on the absolute most basic of business searches. And some of the directions it gives are just completely nonsensical, and it's voice guidance is absolutely terrible making it fairly easy to miss a Direction if you're not able to be looking at the screen
I hate giving my location to Google but at the end of the day they are still the only GPS navigation that doesn't suck at basic navigation
Do u live in some place less humans live? Like a village or something? OSM is mapped by volunteers, which means that less OSM enthusiasts around you = worse mapping. Perhaps you could start a little bit of mapping?
As for the voice navigation, well Organic doesn't have its own voice. It uses ur phone's native text to speech engine. If u have completely degoogled ur phone, then u probably would be using some other tts engine (which most probably sucks ass).
As for the searches, yeah, they need a better local search engine.
Yes, it does. I have used it successfully for months. My main issue is I need traffic data due to a new job and figuring which route to take. AFAIK, no other nav app has traffic data. That's the only real bummer.
also a lot of open maps alternatives rely on YOUR contribution to be good instead of a hired team at some corpo.
use it and help out with it and you will have your open mapping app!
Well change can only be done through voicing disapproval first, although Google will most definitely won't stop the data gathering in Maps.
Well It's understandable if a lot of people wouldn't switch over to OSM-based apps. I've tried OSMAnd, and I observe 3 drawbacks. Lengthy public transport calculation (fair since it's computing on the phone), no reviews in POI areas (really hard to catch up on), weird results in transportations
Absolutely agreed.
Most people (public and private) never go beyond disapproval, though.
You'll hear people complain about this and that, but never even looking for an alternative.
I always try to keep in mind there are a lot of people that are simply unable to transition to alternative apps because they lack knowledge and time to do research on such things. What we see through videos isn't the majority of the people, it is people that make content for the majority.
People have hard times getting into more technical stuff already. Expecting people that are struggling to survive in capitalism to spend their free time learning about underground alternatives or to turn into sys admins and host their own stuff is out of touch if reality in my opinion.
Edit: just wanted to add, I wouldn't say the problem is on the people, but on big tech that predates on them
The problem for me is when someone sends me a location pin it is almost always a Google map link. I have the same issue with people in my community using whatsapp.