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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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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.
That's where. But also I wouldn't be surprised if there are also other sources.
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.