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Comment by voakbasda | Hacker News Reader

I have asked Google (repeatedly) to remove roads on my private property from their Maps. Those roads still appear there, so I find it hard to believe they will honor these types requests either.

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From previous experience they will virtually never 'remove' a road as the road is there and it should appear for 'accuracy' purpose, so if you're trying to get them to do that, that will be the reason why it's staying up.

Instead you have to submit an edit and state in there that it's a private road and on private property so should not be used for navigation purposes. It will then be removed from navigation etc.

Several years back Google started naming the alley ways in my neighborhood as if they were streets. Either all of the car services use Google maps, or other map services made the same decision. This is obvious as drivers are constantly being routed through alleys in my neighborhood for rideshares/deliveries/etc. As a side benefit to this, you can tell if your driver is clueless by watching them go through the alleys to find you or make the obvious decision to not go down an alley.

Several attempts at reporting this to Gmaps has gone ignored.

I had a similar issue. Trying to resolved involved debating the matter ad infinituum with a "local specialist" and was futile with no recourse or oversight.

Google sucks so much at these countless edge cases that it drains all the benefit of anything they're actually good at.

Don't get me started.

There are plenty of reasons to map roads on private property, and presumably it is visible in satellite imagery, so I don't see that as a compelling argument by itself. If we're not counting oceans, most of what is on a map is private property.

My roads are not visible from satellite and are behind locked gates. There is zero legitimate reason for anyone to know these roads exist.

I wonder how Google does know, then.

Probably satellite.

"Not visible from an aerial shot with leaves on" doesn't really mean anything. If the roads aren't buried underground or in a tropical rainforest, they are probably visible to a satellite at the right time or wavelength.

Did the private roads require plan submission and building permits? The plans likely got stored in some government map database, which in turn got sucked in by Google.

New roads can be submitted by users. Google has a map editor where anyone can make changes and have them officially approved. They could have been submitted by a random Google Map user that was scrolling around and noticed missing roads.

Do your roads appear on any government maps? I believe the mapping agency for road is called…shucks I forget. They’re sometimes ahead or behind Google maps.

If it is a private road on private property, I don't care if it is on a gov't map or not. It should not be listed as a route on any publicly available map service. In fact, it should be required to be explicitly labeled as private property "violaters will be prosecuted" type of thing.

Where I live in semi-rural Maine, probably 90+% of the houses are on private roads on private land. If they weren't listed as routes in map services nobody would be able to find us.

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