Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thorrez | Hacker News Reader

>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 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com