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Why people don't talk about Google Maps' privacy issues
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Privacy
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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.
Some further clarification on the closed source thing from their FAQ:
Like there's no open source project with commercial paid licence ?
Or a source-available model.
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.
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)
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.
I think 5 out of that 10% is supplemented by OsmAnd. But it does not have public transport schedules and traffic data.
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?
In my experience that's not how it works out. It's about balancing the load, while making the driver take the least amount of detour needed.
Street B only has to handle the remaining traffic, and street A has a chance to unclog or at least be a faster route as some of its traffic does not exist anymore.
The app doesn't control what people do, it just makes recommendations based on busy segments, based on data which is already obsolete by the time it's being used. Ultimately the lemmings will do whatever their lemming brain tells them to.
(That is, assuming the app doesn't actually try to spread people around the various routes. But I doubt that any app maker wants to assume responsibility for that.)
Ultimately traffic apps are mostly useless. You can't "solve" traffic congestion with apps any more than you can make water flow faster through a pipe. Congestion is constrained by available road space and choke points. Google Maps is mostly an excuse for Google to collect location data, with a thin layer of features on top to make it seem worthwhile.
Water does not think, it flows where it can.
People while driving cannot know which route isn't clogged, because cars are not flowing like water. If that would be the case all the small streets around main roads would be full too. If a street is clogged, and the driver sees it, they can decide to go on a different route, but in waze if they are using it to plan a route, it'll try actively to avoid roads that are too busy.
They are. If they aren't then your city is not really that busy. It's actually a major problem in some cities for the residents of small residential streets that suddenly start getting lots of traffic because their street gets recommended on Waze or Maps.
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.
Not necessarily. The data is out there. I don't think they could make it a part of the core app for legal reasons, but OsmAnd has a plugin system. Basically anyone could make it other than OsmAnd devs. Distribution could happen over an F-droid repo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5eL_al_m7Q
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=k5eL_al_m7Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Where? GMaps sources this data from each of its users.
And Google also trusts that data because it's collected at OS level.
If an open project tried to collect location data they could not trust it. There's no way to prevent malicious users from sending bogus data.
That's where. But also I wouldn't be surprised if there are also other sources.
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!
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.
HERE WeGo has traffic data but of course, as in Google Maps, it sources from other users of the same app.
If not many people use HERE, then the data is also not reliable.
Can you search for street addresses?
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.
I don't just mean the voice, even just HOW it gives directions. Google maps gives you multiple warnings for a turn , one way before, one approaching, one right at. It also will often tell you which lane to take a turn in if multiple exist (use the second from the left lane to turn left) if your next turn is right after with little warning.
It's been a hot minute so i can try again to see if it's changed but directions were terrible with little extra warning and no taking the next direction into account.
The map was also just... Messy, little outlines for buildings everywhere a bunch of random green squares all over the map that I couldn't figure out how to turn off and wasn't even sure what they were meant to represent other than they seemed to roughly correspond with grassy or treed areas but for using it as a navigation app that is extremely annoying because it just makes the whole map of cluttered mess and makes it difficult to really tell what I'm looking at when I'm trying to drive and need to see my next Direction quickly and easily at a glance