Although recently they started enabling another spy to spy on their users, when they decided to rely on fastly.
Now I cannot, with a clean conscience, recommend it to people any longer. What will my answer be to anyone, who asks me: "Well, if you are not using Google maps, what map service are _you_ using?" Now I cannot answer OSM, because then it will be: "But they are also allowing big companies to track their users! You are a hypocrite!"
Basically I need something better now, in order to stay consistent and not become a hypocrite. Perhaps I will use my months ago updated maps.me on my phone instead. However, with maps.me issues of late, I will need to switch that eventually as well.
Remember: Ignorants and uninformed people are not to be optimized for, if we want any quality standards to survive on the WWW. To keep standards, one cannot always go for the lowest common denominator.
Tile serving infrastructure was basically on fire.
While it would be nice to avoid this...
> Basically I need something better now
I am honestly curious what you will use.
They did? How come I've never noticed during any visit to the map website? That's a pity, I'd probably have donated.
> Tile serving infrastructure was basically on fire.
I also did not know that! I never felt any too long lag or anything.
There are also popups during part of the year, but someone with axe to grind ensured that they were added to the adblock filter lists.
I am no lawyer and do not wish to read many pages of their legalese. However, if they somehow managed to convince me, that they are not building profiles, that they are not transferring or selling data to anyone else, and that none of the software they use does so behind their backs, then I might trust them. Now that is very difficult to do of course, almost impossible. I would rather trust a single entity, that is not present in any requests to any other website I visit. That seems to be much lower risk than putting data all in the hands of a single party, which is present on many many websites.
Requires some dedication and lots and lots of disk space and bandwidth - probably most feasible in a box at home with only you yourself having access and not having to pay monthly for high-traffic storage.
What is both illegal and basically impossible and even more complicated technically to do with Google Maps data.
https://github.com/rinigus/osmscout-server
Then it provides various services (routing, PoI search, geocoding, etc.) over this data set to all applications running locally on your machine. It targets mainly various mobile Linux distros but works perfectly fine on desktop as well and is available in flatpak form.
Like this all navigation and mapping can share the same data set and no potentially sensitive location related metadata is leaked to a remote server other than what data packs have been initially downloaded.
Also the community run infrastructure just needs to be able to store and store and distribute the ~150 GB of data packs covering Earth but does not need to have any extensive compute and memory requirements to handle lots expensive of individual API queries.