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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Google Maps a few years back. I received a notification on my phone that a store I was near was having a sale. It was clear that something was leaking my location, and that was being used to push ads to me through Android itself.

A little investigation revealed that the culprit was Google Maps. I uninstalled it at that point and never looked back.

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Using your activity as a substrate for ads has always been Google's business model, and never been a secret. You don't have to go along with it, but it's not a revelation.

You're right, and that's why I firewall off all apps by default so that they can't communicate out. I had granted an exception for Google Maps, accepting that I'll be supplying data to Google.

The revelation was that Google Maps was no longer just being used to collect data, but was being used to actively push ads outside of Maps itself. That was a bridge too far for me.

In the time since, I have rid my device of all Google applications, as Google's overall model is not something I can tolerate any more.

Clearly, it was a revelation to him. Which is Google's fault, not his. Google should communicate clearly and visibly what data they use and for what.

When I first got my Pixel 2 a year or so ago, I was stunned when after a few weeks I started getting notifications like "Check out the McDonalds 1 Block Away!" or "Starbucks is 0.25 miles from you" (or something along those lines). I took about 20 minutes and found all of the setting related to this in Maps and Notifications, and disabled all of them. No, I'm not going to McDonald's daily during my walk to the train, despite what Google is suggesting.

Wonder how close they can get to deliberately routing all traffic through McDonalds and Starbucks drive-throughs, as an unskippable part of the route.

Oh wait, oh wait! They do that and then you get an INSTANT E-COUPON for wherever they drove you through. You'll be driving to nowhere just for the chance to be given amazing discounts en-route!

(open to placing bets on how they will inevitably, literally do this. I want royalties, you bastards :D )

Just wait until Waymo’s self driving cars become a thing.

Your route home will be determined by the highest bidders, so you’ll have no choice but to go past that particular McDonald’s, the in-cabin screens displaying personalised, location-based messages all the while.

Better yet. You will be restricted where you can go based on your net worth or social credit score.

So what do you use now

A sextant

It depends on where I am. Where I live, OSM is quite good and I use that. In areas where OSM is not so good, I just download map images and refer to those by hand.

Not OP, but I waffle between apple maps and google maps. I leave google maps due to the privacy concerns, switch to apple maps, then get mislead a few times, then end back up on google maps. Rinse repeat.

Not OP, but been using Here maps and super happy. It's been said before but I'll say it again - amazing offline support.

Check out maps.me for iOS and Android -> Open source, uses OpenStreetMap data (you can fix it!), offline maps with regular updates.

Ugh. In it's core Maps.me might be a good app. But it's sooo full of tracking stuff [1]. And I'm not even sure exodus catches all of them :-/.

There's a fork on F-Droid just called Maps, which removes all those trackers and works really well. [2] Unfortunately there's currently an issue with downloading the maps data, which makes the app currently unusable without manual workarounds. [3]

The other option would be OSMAnd[4], which is a great app but maybe not quite as user-friendly as maps.me/maps when initally getting started with it.

[1] https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/search/com.... [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ [3] https://gitlab.com/axet/omim/issues/78 [4] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/

Off-topic, but this was my first time hearing about Exodus and I spent quite a bit of time on there. How is it possible that Facebook has zero trackers? https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/71538/

Everything that happens in your Facebook app is saved directly into the Facebook infrastructure. They don't leak it to other companies, they just own it themselves.

For those other apps, they leak the tracking to 3rd party services. That's what those trackers are.

I've tried maps.me, but the one thing I was never able to figure out is my primary use case: how do I search for an address?

I can navigate to nearby bars or shops that it knows about, but if I want to navigate home, what do I do? Searching for an address just returns "no results found" instantly.

"It was clear that something was leaking my location, and that was being used to push ads to me through Android itself."

Android is leaking your location on purpose...

> Android is leaking your location on purpose...

Indeed, but it's possible to stop that. What I meant by "leaking" was that something was getting through despite my efforts to stop it.

Fortunately, the list of possible culprits was small, as I knew what I was allowing access to the internet and what I was not.

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