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Comment by slickrick216 | Hacker News Reader

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for directions. However a few times it’s gone beyond a mere nuance. They’ve had people show up at their door in the middle of the night and some won’t take no for an answer when they tell them google maps has gone wrong. On two occasions this has led to extremely aggressive behavior. My in laws are quite old and as the family tech guy I got asked to step in. I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears. It’s now Google’s fault how people behave but maps have consequences on peoples lives.

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>I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears.

You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me.

Full disclosure I work at Google, not on Maps, and I always did the suggest a change with my personal account.

You've been downvoted, but I think you have a point. Maps support & "suggest a change" are two different sets of ears, and while one may be deaf to this problem, the other may be more responsive.

Normal companies forward wrongly addressed requests to the correct department.

I know it is trendy to bash Google but if you get millions of support requests it would be abnormal to forward support emails for something that has a very clear built-in function right in the product. It isn't a problem with Google that they don't reply to mail for something like this. It is a clear user error.

I disagree. The whole cool part of Google is organizing data and writing good algorithms. Even if they get a million misdirected suggestions a day, they are probably one of the best organizations in the world to figure out how to redirect correctly.

Only companies with very few users.

Another data point, and I don't work at Google. I had to correct a name of one road near us. I think it took only a week or so.

> You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me.

I've had a road that is mis-named near me. I've used the "suggest a change" feature multiple times, but have never gotten a response other than the automated "it'll be reviewed". Road is still mis-named.

Other changes i've suggested have gone through in hours.

Probably have to submit it to OSM and wait until Google loads their data into GMaps. /s

I think google don’t use OSM data.

Well and yet this is what I did and it worked, after around a year of waiting.

It is possible that whoever Google has hired for the local edits uses OSM as a reference in response to feedback received via Google Maps. Not explicitly of course, because this is strictly forbidden, both ways, due to license incompatibility. For OpenStreetMap this is a very important point, because well-meaning novice mappers copying streets or points-of-interest directly from a proprietary map put the project at risk of litigation. Google will likely have such a strong rule in their own internal documentation as well.

OSM strongly discourages the mapping of trap streets — fake streets that only exist on your map for unscrupulous competition to copy so you know that they did so — but it's possible that some mappers do put these on the map. I don't think one of the big proprietary maps has ever been caught copying one of these though.

Not trap streets but details (like small ponds in private areas) and misspellings were reportedly taken ispiration from over the years... :-)

I can confirm that Google appears to import data from OSM.

I added a placemark in OSM in the middle of Bali, Indonesia for an Internet cafe a few years ago, and it's currently also in Google Maps. (The cafe has since been closed for a few years.)

What's interesting is that's why I added it to OSM - to get picked up by Google Maps. :)

What's even more interesting is that when I told people in SV that I was doing that, they told me since it was a copyright violation, Google Maps wouldn't do that. :) :)

OSM uses a different, also incorrect, name for the road. At least the name OSM uses was correct at one point (about a decade ago - also when that feature was last edited).

At least on OSM you can change it yourself.

Indeed. I hesitate to change it manually though, as I know the (former) name of the road was done as part of a 911 upgrade in the early-mid 00's, and a lot of similarly semi-private roads renamed a few years after that. So OSM got their data from some official source a decade ago, and a number of roads throughout the locality are equally messed up by the lack of updates.

I’ve had changes go through, but sometimes in a monkey’s paw way.

I ask the labelling of a school on the map, specifying the name and providing the home town site as proof (a page listing all schools with their adresses and picture), and two days later it was labelled as “<Name of the town> school” completely ignoring the provided info and making the spot misleading. Requests for correction a few months apart didn’t do anything at this point.

So I can vouch for the process sometimes working, and I have nothing to do with Google. Now, why, when and how it works is a complete mystery.

Afaik, the naming of locations is peer-reviewed automatically and by Google Maps users (they have the Local Guide program for this), but actual road changes are a different process.

> Now, why, when and how it works is a complete mystery.

Even when you're dealing with their non-public products!

Every holiday, Google reminds me I need to check the holiday hours for our business on the Google My Business page. So I do.

Every time, despite being the only authorized user on this page and despite the changes I make being nothing strange (things like being closed on christmas, and not to mention their system asked me to check it)......it sits there saying "pending review" for a week or more.

I don't really know what to think about it when they don't trust the business page's actual manager to get the info correct.

> "I've had a road that is mis-named near me. I've used the "suggest a change" feature multiple times, but have never gotten a response other than the automated "it'll be reviewed". Road is still mis-named."

I wonder if it would be easier to just change the street signs rather than convince Google to make the correction.

That sounds like something Douglas Adams would suggest

There is some precedent. Entire countries have had to change their name (or at least, sparked serious debate about it) because of Google:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/czech-prime-minister-wants-to-k...

I did this for the Railroad Museum in Baltimore, years ago, where Google Maps deposited you in a very poor part of the city on the wrong side of the property. It took about two years before I got a follow-up email and the listing updated.

Near me Google maps displays a road that has been removed in 2008. When I found that out earlier last year, I used exactly this feature to suggest a removal. As of now, the road is still on Google Maps and the only response I've ever gotten was the automated email reply.

As a counter anecdote I marked a road as changed (one end was closed off) and it was fixed in a few days. I have made quite a number of edits to Maps so to me this is not at all what I have experienced. Maybe Google is different (IE. worse)) in the US than Scandinavia.

It's very variable for each edit. I've sent about 20 edits over time, all in western Europe; some were accepted rapidly, some were rejected for some reason, some are still stuck in review after months or years.

Even in the same area. A neighborhood name was added, but the street name change in that same neighborhood wasn't.

If Google is anything like other companies, internal employees' own support requests are prioritized, even on external-facing channels.

That would require you to create some association between your personal and work account right? I don't remember doing that. I guess they could match on first name and last name equality, but that sounds like a bad idea due to name collisions and impersonation.

>"That would require you to create some association between your personal and work account right?"

Obtuse af. Is this default assumption that the user is the one who has to "create" associations in the company's systems based on anything? The big tech cos have been social mapping since before 2012 and they undoubtedly register when two accounts use the same IP.

So if I work from a coffeeshop all the other coffeeshop patrons would be considered Google employees?

Creating a system to secretly map my work account and my personal account in order to prioritize my Maps suggestions seems like a huge amount of work for no benefit whatsoever.

This could be a little more intelligent.

E.g. a coffeeshop has a constant stream of accounts on its IP that appear only once or twice. So it might be considered "a public place". So no association is done over accounts arriving from that IP. Your home, OTOH, might have only two accounts on its IP for years, so the association here is stronger.

A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.

The system might not be created "to prioritize Maps suggestions" only and has multiple benefits in other places. Most obvious of these is to prevent people banned from the service to come back with a different account.

(I don't work at G and never did, but worked at another place where we linked accounts.)

Sure it could be more intelligent, but there would always be false positives. For example a Google employee's spouse could likely get correlated. False positives sounds like a bad idea for a system that tries to match personal and work accounts. Also in my case it would be harder possibly because I have a ton of personal Google accounts.

>A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.

I never use the same browser for my work and personal accounts. But in theory that could run into the spousal problem as well for some people.

There is a ton of other information. E.g. for the “security” you are asked to provide a backup email address for your Google account. Also, for the same reason, everyone is now required to provide a cellphone number. If you used one of your Google accounts as a backup for another, or used the same recovery phone number for both, these two accounts can be linked to a same person. This comes in addition to other information about possible links, like geolocation or other trove of data they might have. If you added several accounts to check emails, your phone checks all of them every couple of minutes, from the same IP at the same time, whether you’re at home or not.

In short, the amount of data you are passing to Google, willingly or not, allows them to link these to a single person — you — with an extremely high certainty.

It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a very real thing that all the major players do and a bunch of 3rd party startups as well. Logging in from same browser, showing similar habits on the same IP from home, etc. it’s typically part of data enrichment. I worked on a project that tied into a system like this about 5ish years ago and it was fascinating how deep this goes. I thought I was just not on top of things but now I see a google employee also in the dark about it. This feels like one of those things 5 years from now will create a scandal when a journalist wraps their head around what it is

Associating these accounts using data like IP address, cookies, etc. etc., over time, is core technology for Google and probably happens automatically. Whether they use it to prioritize Maps suggestions I don't know.

You really think that Google spent the time to build a system that secretly links employees’ accounts to their personal accounts—something that Googlers would have to build and would also piss off those same Googlers—and then uses that system to prioritize feedback from Googlers just to make their own employees have a better Maps feedback experience?

No, I think Google built a system to link every email address used by an individual and all their browsing habits. Not specific to their employees but to do that on everyone in the planet.

It also makes the simple connection that a user also has a google.com account without doing anything special.

Although I suspect they do have something home built as every single company I’ve worked for with a broad customer facing product has had some flag to note employee accounts. I built this sometimes and was usually to help understand if some random suggestion was from a bigwig worth looking up. You never want to be in a situation where “Ms So and So, EVP of some department you don’t know submitted a question a week ago and got no answer. She mentioned it to me at the EVP monthly hobo hunt, yadda yadda yadda.”

You're misunderstanding as you speculating. You've now shifted to "Googler has a special friendly-spying apparatus, enabled by its core technology", to "every company has the same apparatus, and low level line employees are treated the same as EVPs", which is absurd as everyone here knows.

And saying "hobo hunt" shows you obviously aren't engaging in serious conversation.

I may likely be misunderstanding.

I was trying to convey that Google just already tracks all linked email accounts so it seems natural that they would be able to trivially identify or prioritize inbound suggestions from employees.

I also wanted to say that even if they did build a custom system to sort employees, it’s not hard. It’s not a super secret tech, but something I’ve personally implemented in an afternoon 20 years ago, so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s easy to do. If they want to.

I added the “hobo hunt” joke as I think infusing humor in arbitrary engagements makes it easier to engage in serious conversation. And all my serious conversations involve humor. Of course, I seriously doubt that any company executives routinely engage in hunting homeless persons and used something extremely absurd and impossible.

Before you start working at Google and get an internal email address you have almost certainly communicated with HR using your external email address...a basic profile has been setup etc

Correct. Ever use the multi-accounts login feature on Google?

I ... don't get it.

You say you work for Google, so you must know that the company you work for amasses huge amounts of information on billions of people on the internet. It then uses that information to sell personalized ads to these people. Advertisers love that, and they pay the rates, and that's how Google makes money for your paycheck — and much more.

What makes you think they "require" any action on the part of these people to "create associations" between accounts? They are making billions by doing it because they can.

Because as a Google employee they understand what is and isn't done as a matter of privacy?

Do you have any evidence that Google spies on its own employees for the purpose of giving them privileged manual treatment when they don't ask for it?

Do you have any evidence that Google create associations between separate Google accounts to the extent of treating them as the same accountholder (asside from deleting duplicate spam accounts)?

If there was any such evidence, it would only be known to a small subset of people who work at Google. The only thing anyone else has to go on is very general privacy policies and Google employees commenting on forums! The public only has an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

Some years ago, I watched some historical TV show (could be Rome?) where one of the characters has been diagnosed with some disease, so I wondered if they knew how to properly diagnose it at the time the show was set at. So I used Google to search for the disease to get to its Wikipedia page. Then I almost forgot about it.

For months after that, Google bombarded me with the links to the disease and cures and remedies and whatnot.

I remember even seeing that at my kid's gaming PC, and I don't remember ever logging in to my Google account there. We only shared the same IP in the household.

That's pretty anecdotal, I know, but that's what there is.

A typical facebook/google employee defending his company. Common is it that hard to link whether its same or different people? The people who use same browser, ip , same habit etc can easily be guessed right?

I don't use the same browser for my personal and work accounts. Yeah guesses can be made, but they'll have false positives (spouses for example). For a system to link personal and work accounts I think false positives would be bad.

I've had the exact same problem, reported it, and been ignored. Not all of us work at Google.

The trick is to add keywords that make the issue "weight" more heavy. Suggest in your request for change, that this might open up google to liability

Is there any evidence that works? In general Google has no liability for publishing incorrect information.

It shouldn't be up to people to have to spend time and money to correct Google's errors, and to stop Google inconviencing them. Somehow, it has become completely accepted for Google/FB/et al to make profits while shifting costs and externalities onto society.

Why do we allow these tech giants to treat us so disgracefully?

Do you even remember what it was like trying to find your way around a foreign city before google maps? They mapped the world and provided it as a service for free.

Yes, I used services like Map24.

I do. I remember adding a lot of buffer time just in case I wouldn't be able to find my way. It is much more convenient now with G-Maps and other providers. I also remember how expensive the maps for the early navigation systems were and how bad they were.

I remember. You had to plan in advance and communicate with others.

you stopped at a gas station and bought a mapsco.

Paper maps were often only marginally useful due to lack of proper street signs or building numbers, especially at night or in bad weather.

There were other mapping services too. Google also didn't start from blank map, they bought data from Navteq/TeleAtlas.

>Why do we allow these tech giants to treat us so disgracefully?

Because we've already been conditioned to accept this kind of behavior from our local governments.

Tech giants have the same rights individuals do to spend boring but annoying misinformation ("rumors").

How should these issues be caught without people submitting them to Google?

There are two towns in rural Hungary which are reasonably well connected: you need to take a so called secondary main road then after a short time turn to another and again in a short time there you are -- but that's not a direct route even if it's fast. The direct route is an unpaved road cutting across the countryside near two tiny villages if you can call that a "road": more than half of the year it is an unpassable mud trap. The locals regularly need to use their tractors to get the hapless Google Map followers out of it. It's so ridiculous it became a national sensation.

> You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me.

My home address is wrong on Google Maps. It's correct on our national postal services' postcode system, but that only covers public post: most private couriers use Google for some reason. As do Uber/delivery drivers/taxis/etc. I live in an urban centre (Dublin, home of Google's EU HQ) so it's not some obscure rural farm.

I've used their suggest a change feature within Maps pretty much every month since I've lived here and even received automated responses telling me the suggestion has been "processed" or similar. No change to the map though.

Correct yeah that one. It got rejected 3 times and has now been under review for a long period. I think it’s something to do with when you type in the name of the area it marks it on the driveway. So people looking for the village of the same name as the area get directed there.

Where I live, they'll send you down logging roads and old, disused roads fit only for 4WD trucks.

It's not just Google. Other GPS maps will send you to my house on a road that hasn't really been passable for 30 or 40 years - if you make the mistake of not telling it to avoid dirt roads. But, if you tell it to stick to paved roads, it'll have you park about 2 km away.

I have no idea how to fix this, except to suggest that they update the maps that the GPS relies on. It's such a remote area that it's not a priority for them. Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.

Google tracks all Android phones all the time, they should be able to see that no one uses that road, they just don't care.

Plenty of people with their Android phones will still go over that section with their snowmobiles, four-wheelers, bike, etc.

How does Google tell the difference between someone on an electric bike vs a car going on a dirt road doing 20-30km/h to not have rocks flying everywhere?

I ran into this problem a lot when I was living in downtown SF of all places. One should never drive in front of AT&T/Oracle stadium when an event is ending, as the traffic is insane and part of the road is closed to allow for the mass of pedestrians. But Maps interprets pedestrian traffic as car traffic and shows that section of the road as green and moving faster than the sections with actual cars, and tries to direct you down it.

Reminds me of the fellow who tried forcing it to think traffic was bad by dragging a cart full of cell phones down the road slowly

> How does Google tell the difference between someone on an electric bike vs a car

With all the sensors in the phone, it is not that hard. There's a lot of research in that field...

I couldn't find a paper that talks about the specifics of this very problem. The ones I've found in the past fail with outliers like a bike going through stopped traffic and or the scenario above.

The best approach I could think of is they expand the time they're looking at to classify the vehicles before the outlier situations.

Obviously we need to have Google connect our cars to the internet so they have more data points. And we also need Google to connect our bikes to the internet, that way Google can tell the different between a bike and a car. And we need to prevent the bike from being able to be used if the Google tech isn't charged and working, because it would be dangerous for everyone else if Google thought that person was in a car and not a bike.

You jest, but in time this will be true, not because of Google, but insurance requirements. Same for autonomous cars. You would still be able to drive your car yourself, if you can afford the insurance, and you won't.

I believe you can get a lot of information from accelerometer data. Especially when compared with other data for the same road. Is it even used in this way?

Google doesn't use Android phone location data as effectively as they could for privacy reasons. Tracking people's location in aggregate to make decisions about which roads are usable at which speeds is okay, but as soon as you get to the levels of "only one guy went along this road in 2020, should we mark it as private", it becomes a privacy issue.

It's a privacy issue to use that kind of data, because the employees who build the map shouldn't be looking at one guys GPS traces. So instead the traces are cut into tiny chunks and aggregated and only shown where there are more than 50 people at the same spot. That effectively means there is no data available to make decisions on the most rarely used roads.

That fact in itself is a data point however.

> So instead the traces are cut into tiny chunks and aggregated and only shown where there are more than 50 people at the same spot.

The same algo that does that could tell the field mapper to go look at roads that are barely used (or whatever criteria ends up being the best), it doesn't need to tell them how many people or who went on that road.

Sometimes I think that Google create their road maps solely using satellite pictures.

First, I’m not sure how much they would be concerned about privacy issues of only a single person over a year. They uniquely identify individuals over multiple sessions. I think they also wouldn’t need to know the specific identity (“John Doe”) and could just use their anonymized id (a unique individual whose name we don’t know).

Also, even if they choose to not do this for maps even though they do it for lots of other things, merely aggregate traffic info on roads would be useful. 364 days of zero traffic and one day with 30 minutes of one car would be useful.

But people do use the road:

> Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong.

A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The situation is even more complicated in ND where some section line roads are sketchy as hell but if they stop being used the adjacent landowner can take them over. This has led to some bad behavior like landowners putting up (illegal) signs and gates and it seems getting google to remove some legitimate roads from google maps.

Where is ND? North Dakota?

Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.

Probably not. At least one person dies each year in the Mojave Desert because they were following an electronic map instead of a paper map. It's in the local news most times it happens.

I think the answer is to put up a gate with keypad and just provide the code to the landowner that has right of way. expensive but 100% effective.

Even a gate with just a rope latch would give most people pause.

You'd need to get cooperation from the other folks using the road that they'd replace the rope after driving through.

You'd need more cooperation to put a pin-code activated electronic gate up.

But at least the gate would automatically close once they went through.

Just need a gate that exerts tension when it's opened, so it'll drift back to closed if someone forgets. I've crossed a lot of back-country gates, never seen a wild breakdown of the system.

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. You can't do that with a rope.

Or even a "private property, no trespassing" sign.

Maybe just a dead end sign even.

People where I live are illegaly putting such signs up even if the road is public to limit trafic near their homes. I just ignore those.

The right answer is for the near-trillion dollar company to stop calling what is not a road a road I'd think rather than a rural landowner to have to go thru the expense of putting up a gate!

Maps have had errors since the dawn of them, yes, even the land registry isn't always right, and yes, even state as a whole sometimes can't agree on their border (i.e. France and Monte Bianco)

The right answer is for users not to be brainlessly following whatever their corpo device tells them to be the truth.

The answer is to put the burden of cost on the victim?

Grandparent poster should've called it a workaround.. yeah the solution is to pester Google to fix their procedures, but how much time are you willing to invest on a war that you might not even win?

That could work only if the city ordinance allowed it. If not, they can request a variance hearing with the city officials to explain them the situation and (hopefully) get approved.

It seems like the obvious solution to this would be a large sign at the entrance to the driveway.

There is no way the general public trusts a sign over Google.

Even if they trusted the sign, I have observed that people (myself included) often don't even _see_ all the signs when we're being directed by the GPS. I'd love to see a study on what changes about your perception when using a navigation system.

The same happens when we follow the directions of a passenger navigating for us. My bet: part of us is concentrating on hearing instead of seeing. We've also delegated navigation to somebody else and that impairs our navigation abilities until we're back doing it ourselves.

"Regulatory and warning signs should be used conservatively because these signs, if used to excess, tend to lose their effectiveness."

-- Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, 2009 edition, section 2A.04, paragraph 01

Replace 'signs' with anything--no one's patience/attention will hold up in the face of a constant barrage of information.

It seems like the obvious solution to this would be for Google to provide a sensible way to accept corrections to their maps.

We had to get a change made to Google maps to prevent people getting killed here, and it took national news, and personal contacts within the organisation.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

In the US its pretty easy to submit corrections. I've submitted a few corrections on US public lands but now I usually don't bother and just update open street map instead.

I have submitted many glaring fixes, often multiple times for when it continues to be a problem, over months... and almost never is it fixed.

I once submitted a correction for the exact location of a public park. The correction looked like it was applied, but when I looked later it had been reverted.

The data pipelines for maps can be very long - certain changes might take 6 months or more to be applied, because the computation required to rebuild certain things is massive, and it isn't worth doing simply because some street edge moved by a few centimeters.

This wasn't a few centimeters - I had trouble finding the park because Google had it a couple of blocks away from its actual location.

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" is quote from Hamlet :)

> and just update open street map instead

I think this is the right approach. Why do free ground-proofing for a for-profit company? (Who is also so unresponsive). Better to submit fixes to a community project.

I’d be gobsmacked if a sign helped. Signs are like v1.0 for pop-ups, pretty much no one reads them. It’s always amusing seeing the way signs in communal facilities change over time, nice, to passive aggressive to raw anger.

It happens all over in my country, Australia. My neighbor has signs, I've petitioned Maps several times that it's private property and nope: ignored.

A friend of mine just bought a property in regional Australia, and Maps wants to send anyone going to going to his place via forestry roads and then across two private properties to get there, despite having main road access.

Once in another part of Oz, we were sent up a cliff face, in the middle of the night, and it took an hour and a half to correct it's mistake.

Every time I try and "fix" maps by reporting it, and very very very rarely is it fixed

Another property has two "crown roads" on it, but to all purposes, they're very dangerous 4wd trails, again thru private property. The owner has signs, but the belligerent and unaware swear by the Goog, insisting it's correct.

I prefer paper maps over the Google rubbish.

Paper maps also never run out of batteries or refuse to work as expected because they can't reach a cell tower. I'm so glad my parents took me camping on the US-Canadian border as a kid and forced me to navigate for the family (with them double-checking). Teach your kids to navigate by map. When you really need it, you really need it.

Hiking in Hong Kong, Google maps disagreed with the route I was attempting to take on Sir Cecil's Ride back around the back side of the rock quarry. Google maps took us across the front face of the quarry, past the police shooting range / Explosive Ordinance Disposal Depot, and up a sheer rock face next to the quarry with the assistance of a cobbled-together rope some kind soul left for others, then through a bamboo thicket that cut my wife's legs up. My wife no longer insists on following Google maps if it disagrees with the hiking route I'm planning.

People routinely ignore these - and if caught, they claim "but I'm following Maps, it's never wrong"... yeah, you're a fucking semi driver now stuck on a forest path (e.g. this one: https://rp-online.de/nrw/panorama/hagen-40-tonner-lkw-im-wal...).

Yeah we did that recently. Should have mentioned it. Some people sadly don’t read signs though.

> I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears.

Cue Googler who will find this comment and magically fix this problem. The HN effect.

Submit a complaint to a state regulator. Someone at Google will wake up and sort it out once they get an email from their regulator to Google’s compliance team. If you can get a lawyer to submit the complain it’ll be even more effective.

What regulator would have jurisdiction here? Are maps even regulated?

A very flippant "HN techbro libertarian" response. Pretty much everything that is not constitutionally protected as a right can be regulated, why would you possibly think that it couldn't?

Yes, you absolutely could lobby for someone to write a law requiring Google to respond to nuisance requests from their navigation services. That is basically what DMCA does, after all.

Hypothetical example law: OK, you have a good-faith presumption up until someone emails you a copy of a deed and proves it's their driveway, then you legally need to correct it within X days or penalties start to rack up.

Your response is unnecessarily aggressive. His questions are innocent.

I agree. And it resorts to name-calling. What's a techbro, anyway.

You've said that stuff which isn't constitutionally protected _can_ be regulated, but the question posed was _are_ maps regulated. Are they? What legal obligation to accuracy or comprehensiveness are map-makers bound by? And are maps constitutionally protected? If political donations are speech then maps certainly seem like speech.

Regulators get to determine what counts as a road and what is "just a trail" (it can be an important legal distinction), and they get to determine whether a particular road is public (even if it crosses private property), and in many places worldwide that official road map data is available from the government.

If that has been done, then it simplifies the dispute as you can objectively verify whether the complaint matches the official data and Google should not be routing cars there, or if the maps are correct and the appropriate solution would not involve Google - e.g. if a road is physically impassable then complaints to whoever is responsible for maintaining that road; if there are barriers or "do not enter" signs on a legally public road, then complaints to the authorities to remove these barriers and punish whoever put them up, if a path is marked public but you think it shouldn't be then legal action to try and correct it (which may or may not succeed), etc.

Some folks get way too entitled about a product that a private company puts out for free.

If you want a solution for this today: put up a sign, with a google maps logo on it saying "wrong way" in big letters, below it explain that google have wrongly marked this trail as a road.

they'll have a hard time, keeping up with the changing logo!

Have you tried looking at Open Street Maps? If your county's GIS and OSM both exclude their driveway, it might be easier to get Google to update.

In my area, it sees like some of the driveways have turned into roads because of overly helpful contributors.

We live in a street named 'ms x of y' and someone renamed our street to y. As there was anither street called 'z x', deliveries were always going to the wrong street, or marked as invalid address.

Fixing it in OSM fixed it slowly in all drivers navigation systems and after a year no deliveries were lost anymore

Google won't look in OSM... All kinds of legal hurdles there...

They can look in some government maps, depending on the licenses.

I wouldn't say so. According to [1] they're a big supporter of OSM.

[1]: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/615/can-google-maps...

> Google, and other companies are welcome to use OpenStreetMap Data as long as they meet their obligations in the OpenStreetMap License.

But they do not make wide use of OSM data, because one of the terms of the license is attribution, of which there is none on any Google product I have seen.

I would guess they are big supporters of OSM as a hiring thing - by supporting an opensource project, you will get young engineers interested in mapping, some of which will then go work on Google Maps.

It also helps any antitrust cases if Google isn't the only game in town, which was the case for many years.

Yeah I have it’s quite strange only Google maps seems to have it. It’s not on any official maps either. Think it’s happening due to it looking like a road and on the maps the name of the area being near the center at the end of the road. It ends a swamp too which is quite a shock for some people.

I love how this article talks about the neglect of the process from Google and probably says something significant about russia's relationship with google in general and google maps at the cost of two of their own citizens needlessly dying by freezing to death and in the top rated comments is bicker about whether an old couple should be the one to pay for a gate to stop accidental trespassing.

I get the problems are both of the same origin, but the discussion has a much better chance of making progress and getting Google's attention which is hard to do when people's lives are at stake. Or when they have been lost directly due to their own oversights.

Apparently there are people who try to mark public roads as "private" on Open Street Maps to discourage Waze from sending traffic. But Waze seems to love sending people via quiet roads, so maybe that's why Google is ignoring you. They think your inlaws driveway is a nice shortcut and don't care who owns it.

> I’ve done the whole google [*] support thing but no response and deaf ears

Seems to be the Google way of doing things: they can't do everything with algorithms!

Goes the other way too. We were looking at some property and were aggressively confronted after going down someone's apparent driveway in the country just like this. It was not at all clear it was a personal driveway and the person was quite rude.

you cant gate it but you should be able to ~park~ vehicles in your own driveway.

there is a situation similar to this near me and it has caused damages and near fatalities as vehicles moving 50 mph roar down the driveway, round the bend and suddenly there are people, a well head a house and a seafright container up front and center.

IANAL, but would it be possible to sue Google (in small claims) over the nuisance?

What are the monetary damages, and how can you prove Google caused the damage?

The monetary damages would be determined based on the level of nuisance caused, which could be objectively measured by the data google keeps on trip routing that has utilized that particular road.

Love the whole "nothing can be measured, who can say!?" attitude on Google of all fucking things. They log everything and delete nothing. Yes, they absolutely do know how many people they've routed down that person's driveway, and a subpoena/discovery would clear it right up.

Seeking damages seems silly, but I’m sure that’s something you could get a court to order Google to change.

Technically you could make the argument that the map directions are incitement/solicitation to commit a crime. But I doubt you’d get a prosecutor to pick up that case.

Just make it up. This will never go to trial. Google's lawyers will see that the plaintiff is correct and make the change in maps.

Have you explored sending a legal notice through a lawyer?

Errect a signpost with a discouraging message.

And Google intentionally make it difficult to get ahold of any actual human. I really hope they get broken up, they are clearly a monopoly and abuse their power.

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