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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

It's not a technical limitation, either. There's plenty of cases where they could use use information locally on your device without sending it back to the mothership, but instead they deliberately cripple their services if you don't allow access.

One example - have you ever noticed how Google Maps has barely any street names any more? And the streets that are named are random tiny side streets, no matter how far you zoom in or out. It's because it's designed to be used in Directions mode with location services enabled, and only in Directions mode with location services enabled. You don't need street names if you're a dot following a blue line. Just coincidentally, this is the mode where they get full information about your journey.

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> It's because it's designed to be used in Directions mode with location services enabled, and only in Directions mode with location services enabled.

If you don't provide a source for this, I'm going to call bullshit.

Screenshot of desktop Google Maps without sign-in: http://prnt.sc/d4j744

Screenshot of Android Google Maps without sign-in: http://prnt.sc/d4jwdy

Both look full of street names to me.

Here you go!

https://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/what-happened-to-google-...

it was on HN a few months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604387

The maps on the right in this article are a pretty good approximation to what I get on my last and current phones. It only touches briefly on street names and other labels but the dramatic reduction is clearly visible.

taneq was saying that Google Maps now shows very few street names, but your link doesn't talk about street names, and is about city names instead.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, on unrelated stuff.)

You should read all the article.

I have Location turned off on my phone and have had Location History by Google turned off for ages. Google Maps on my Galaxy S6 looks like the desktop screenshot.

"...They deliberately cripple" is the wrong wording, they designed it so that they extract maximum value out of you. Because you, are not paying them. Their services are maximally efficient... for them, and just efficient enough for you not to ditch them.

Which is pretty much equivalent. From their point of view, it's some optimum of profit-to-usability space. From my point of view, it's a hodgepodge of subpar features, user-hostile addons and stupid engineering decisions (being on-line when you don't need to), that I nevertheless can't abandon, because everyone else is doing an even worse job.

I see where you're coming from, and I agree that they designed it to extract maximum value from their users. But when, in order to do so, they deliberately make their product punish non-data-yielding users, I think that absolutely deserves to be described as "deliberately crippled."

Your initial point and example are completely unrelated. There are many examples where Google services suck without their online servers, Maps is one of the few that can actually work really well in offline mode.

Google Maps has the whole download area features[0]. If you have an area downloaded, you can see the entire area rendered at (any/most?) zoom levels, see street names, and even get directions.

As for information density, it seems to be a choice of the Google Maps team to show less data at various zoom levels. That has little to do with talking to their online services and more about how the maps team wants to present data to their users.

[0] https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?co=GENIE.Plat...

> Maps is one of the few that can actually work really well in offline mode.

Just how long will it take for google to ask you to long it to do all those useful things that it does? Ability to escape googles panopticon is one of the reasons it's important to support OpenStreetMap https://donate.openstreetmap.org/

I think you might need to reinstall Maps or something. Mine displays the names you would expect at every zoom level, with and without location services turned on.

How can they suggest places without sending your location to their servers? I would expect all the "intelligence" (place recommendation etc.) to be implemented server-side.

Very simply. It's as trivial as you can imagine.

You prefetch the list of locations in the area of interest (there won't be that many compared to the humongous amounts of space Google apps consume already), you keep your user's "personality matrix" synchronized, and then when user asks, e.g., for a restaurant nearby, you display them from off-line cache, sorted by distance, characteristics and by how well they match user's personality matrix.

It would be that simple, if it was about actually suggesting places. But it isn't. It's about suggesting places that pay for advertising and successfully billing them, while also collecting as much data about the users as possible. It's a common occurrence on mobile (and also increasingly common in hardware and desktop software) - things that don't need to be on-line are put on the Internet nevertheless, to facilitate a specific business model.

Someone once told me that this is how Apple Maps works so that they can maintain a high privacy standard - though I'd be curious if someone else could verify.

Maybe, for starters, by querying the area of the map that is currently displayed, rather than your current location? Which is more in line with what you'd usually want anyway.

On my Window phone, I have an app that can do navigation while offline... many companies, like Google, want everything to be server side because they want to learn more about you.

I would like to take roughly the "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" approach here and suggest that it's not an intentional crippling, but the fact that the product developers likely do not design for a logged out experience in the least.

I run tech for a few websites, and we could design for the "no JS" user, there are likely MINOR changes needed for much better support, but it's simply not something that we consider at all. I imagine it's similar with Google, they're designing for the logged in user, with maybe automated testing on the logged out user.

One thing I (and many non-technical friends) found creepy recently is how Google Maps monitors your phone camera. An update quietly pushed this on-by-default feature for the purpose of prompting you to add images to their product.

I wrote more on this and how to disable it here: https://unop.uk/on-google-maps-geotagging-and-privacy

Edit: looks like they have pushed out at least two new on-by-default features since I wrote this (not that long ago); 'photo view count opportunities' and 'new and popular places'.

Seems like people actually like this feature judging by the response‽ Or maybe they just work for Google. :)

Well, "monitors your phone camera" is a very misleading way to put it. They "monitor" your photo library, in a way that I think most people would expect. If you take a picture with the GPS on, obviously your phone knows where you are, it's not that weird to ask you something based on your location. I don't think most people expect Google Maps to be completely disconnected from the rest of their Google phone.

OK, I could have been more precise in my wording. I meant that it monitor photos that you take with your phone camera not that it constantly monitors what the camera sees. I didn't intend to mislead and I think that's a reasonable interpretation.

I still think that this is unexpected behaviour. It belongs in the camera app, not the maps app. The expectation is that apps are sand-boxed and separate from each other.

I have anecdotal evidence from friends who don't normally care about issues like this. Yet they felt compelled enough to pro-actively share this with comments similar to "NO GOOGLE!", which suggests it's not just me.

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