maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
garrit.xyz
garrit.xyz
In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)
As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.
Not much use if you want to search bakery's.
I suspect that isn't all just one big coincidence.
A cable or telephone company has generalized coverage measured in states; some of them organize their network and customer IPs by small geographies, but sometimes all of southern california is in a single pool of IPs.
Of course, personally if I wanted to search for nearby bakeries on my phone I'd have just opened the google maps app....
Maybe it's more effective in places like the US.
Only when you're using a phone? Only if you're not at home? What if you want to find out what a bakery is?
(Apologies for rapid fire, I'm not having a go at you, just curious)
One could show a map preview of local results, which can be expanded as well as generic search results below/aside/...
We're showing you local results. To search the internet for "bakery" click here
It'd be great if they did that for anything personalized as well while they're at it
No, eg when I'm at the office, and we talk about where to go eat and I type restaurant, or I need a new stapler and I type office supply, etc ...
> Only if you're not at home?
Not really, eg "movie theater" or "flower shop" come to mind for things I would request while at home
> What if you want to find out what a bakery is?
I would type what is a bakery or define bakery ?
I'm a long time tech user, I miss the days of keyword centric search as I felt I could more easily communicate to the search engine what I wanted, but let's be honest those days have passed, most people type sentence and thus the engine interpret sentences
It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.
And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.
The fact that Google doesn’t see the blatantly obvious problem, or that they try to argue that the users are wrong is a textbook case of why Apple has been doing OK in the market downturn while Google’s business continues to crash. Apple prioritizes their core products and human interface design, Google prioritizes short-term (advertising) revenue, while neglecting their core products in favor of the latest shiny thing.
0: https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar...
I actually remember google.com/maps being launched at IO in 2014 -- the presentation had a broken link in it for the new version of Maps, and a few of us DoS SRE watching the livestream were able to hack together a config change in a few minutes to fix it without waiting for a urlmap push :)
But unification had started even earlier than that. Pretty much since Larry became CEO again, he pushed this mantra of "One Google", which brought the infamous Kennedy redesign across all services, as well as more of them available under the google.com host (e.g. maps as discussed here, but also flights and more). One of the ideas behind the latter was that you had to log into your Google account just once, which gradually made it all the way to YouTube(!). I vaguely recall other factors, such as compensating for the increased latency from going HTTPS everywhere, but also discussions about securing and hardening cookies.
As far as I know, google.com/maps has been around the entire time, but perhaps now it might be simply the canonical URL in a larger number of cases.
Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiative like this is/would be carried out. Would you imagine it as a buried lede or as a very transparent, explicit OKR?
Like, one thing I've wanted on occasion is the ability to search for brick and mortar stores in a given radius who have the thing I want -- either because I want to physically inspect it before committing to a purchase or because for whatever reason the time/cost of shipping wouldn't be practical.
That sort of query is hard for Google to serve right now though for reasons including the lack of relevant location information in both the search results and the queries whose user behavior would help drive relevance rankings for those location-specific results.
Location information is a bit of a double-edged sword too though, even ignoring privacy concerns. I have to spoof my location and change my search language to get some results because of aggressive filtering happening behind the scenes. If a given query doesn't match Google's current understanding of the user then the right results existing in the corpus often won't imply that the user is able to find them with _any_ search operators.
There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time.
So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.
I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well?
This is why I'm building https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place.
All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.
If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.
The pendulum should swing back to complex and more complicated interfaces sometime — but right now these are the dark times where, for example, Netflix, this huge, popular movie and show library, doesn't even have a way to find out exactly what movies with some actor or director it has available. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that.
Your project does look useful and on point though!
Scroll through recommendations. It looks like they have hundreds of great movies for you to watch! And yes, technically they do. But look how many times they try suggesting the same movies in different categories, inflating the view in a way to make the library seem bigger. One movie might show up "Because you liked comedy..." then "Because you watched <comedy movie>" then "Light-hearted movies".
TLDR money and masking their poor library quality.
I meant it more like, why wouldn’t they fix this objectively bad input mechanism? It would take tiny effort but it wouldn’t improve their sales or they might even calculate that it drives usage of iPhones and therefore good for them even though it’s bad for the users.
For the record I own both an Apple TV and an iPhone, inasmuch one can pretend to own these devices.
Seems like it can be changed.
Settings > General > Keyboard, then switch from “Automatic” to “Grid”.
For some reason I wasn’t getting automatic updates but after a manual update I can now see and set this option.
I retract my earlier statements, thank you Apple devs!
The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy".
There are two forces at play here. One side wants privacy. When they give data to Google Calendar, they don't want Google Maps or Ads know about it. The other side (your opinion above) wants more integration between services.
In this political climate, the privacy side has an edge. This means if Google Photos want to access data on Google Calendar to provide the integration you asked above, they will have to jump through multiple quarters of privacy reviews, with a very high odd of being shutdown.
> All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market
After I see how the sausages are made, I think claims like these are naive. It's worth learning more about the factors at play before criticizing something. More often than not, the agents are acting pretty rationally based on the situation.
All of these concerns could be trivially addressed by leaving them up to the user. Add the necessary controls to the user account page, pick default settings biased in favor of privacy, and allow users to change them if they prefer.
It's that in their infinite wisdom they shut it down. Just like they shut down hangouts in their infinite wisdom.
hangout is now integrated in meet, which is integrated in gmail.
it's google doing a microsoft/apple and trying to be the leader in video calls/remote work/remote classes by forcing people to have it ready just by having the gmail app.
just like apple with facetime (but they have no idea how to expand on it) or Microsoft adding teams to windows status bar, you like it or not.
* Google eventually added so many features to Gmail that they had to add a progress bar during page load.
Do Not Give google credit for privacy.
first, showing maps for a location it is already showing on the screen... the data is already all there. it is pure and simple calendar team didn't want to bother using maps team's api. nothing else. nobody had a meeting and decided against it because of user privacy.
second, no matter the product, the only integration all of them MUST have is to both advertising and profile. those two internal apis respectively serve ads against your profile (ssp) and add events to your profile to later target ads.
so no, absolutely nothing on google deserve the privacy argument.
Yes there are business/internal-politics reasons why some obvious features or experimentation doesn’t happen, but those aren’t necessarily good reasons beyond short term benefit to specific individuals at a company.
But I do think some of it can generally be blamed on large companies losing their ability to be nimble due to the inherent friction of the politics and logistics that build up as an organization grows.
In the example of this integration, allowing it to open in the sidebar was okay because it was a user action, and there is some data anonymization that happens (I don't recall the details, this was a few years ago).
But we couldn't share a list of your appointments with maps ahead of time to allow them to generate the view you describe, because there wasn't a way that guaranteed that the data wouldn't be associated back with the original user.
Further, I don't think users are generally against services using the information - which the user has presumably already provided intentionally - to better serve them. The problem is when that information is shared with third parties or used for purposes which are not obviously in the users' best interests. IMO, any user data stored externally should be subject to an opt-in permissions system which strictly defines how the data can be used. That doesn't stop companies like Google from being able to offer me useful services that I might actually be interested in. The notion that privacy discourages innovation is just silly.
The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy"
Once Google has my data, how does it affect my "privacy" if Google Service A shares it with Google Service B?
I'm somewhat privacy conscious, but I don't understand the concern there. I assume that once I give them my data, they're already doing whatever with it internally.
The search maps is just a terrible experience, half implemented, doesn't do what I want, even down to little things.
My hack is to pick directions, which will get me to Google Maps, then cancel directions, this loses all state, but you're still in the location you want and can usually then just click the business you were looking for.
Other than some abstract “branding” campaign, I cannot really see many other reasons why they would be doing this.
And as someone who worked in adtech in the past, it was very well known that Google used their domain as their tracking cookie domain as it’s nearly impossible for adblockers to just block without crippling other functionality. So they even have a history of using precisely these types of techniques.
If you consider it absolutely unthinkable that it was not one of the reasons, it's you who is being too generous. Unconsidered side effects occur plentiful and all the time.
The person you are replying to didn't use the word "unthinkable" or even imply it.
I think you are being either incredibly naive or disingenuous if you believe an adtech giant like google doesn't factor changes to data gathering into every single decision they make.
Given the breadth of services the company provides, a user ought to be able to restrict the permission to the scope of the maps tool.
2. The change does have the effect of Google gaining more permissions (and subsequently more data) than previously
3. The author assumes that (2) is the (main) reason why (1) was done in the first place
Regardless of whether (3) is correct or completely wrong - and regardless of whether the author truly believes (3), or only uses it as a rhetorical trick to increase the controversy (and therefore the reach) of their post - both (1) and (2) remain fact.
And (2) is the actual problem here - regardless of whether it was done intentionally by Google or not.
But collecting more of that data which their marketing business makes it's profits from, is likely to have a positive effect on their bottom line.
And since the change already has been live for a while in some regions, it seems likely that Google is well aware of how much impact this change has on their revenue.
You decide for yourself if money is or isn't the reason why a big corporation like Google would do something like that.
There's a huge logic gap here. Obtaining more permissions doesn't at all imply obtaining more data when it's caused by an incidental change. Maybe the permissions aren't being used outside of the Maps context, or maybe it doesn't matter because the data was already be known.
However, it’s generally very easy to predict what a company is going to do by observing their business model and incentive structure. In Google’s case, collecting as much data as possible is a major part of their business, so without more information, there’s no good reason to assume they won’t do it.
You could track usage and see what pages on google.com are accessing these APIs.
I doubt that it's a lot. Google already has fairly good geo-localization based on IP, GPS-level accuracy isn't necessary for ads. They could've already connected your data from maps.google.com to www.google.com, because both are using consent.google.com and you're getting a .google.com unique cookie.
This is mostly just outrage because people don't understand how things work.
Pretty sure I’ve been experiencing this change for many years at this point.
Did we read the same short article? [not parody]
It's so short, we can copy paste it here and then you can point out where he reasoned that Google did this with intent to track.
> But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.
OP is simply stating a consequence of this change!
"Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services."
This and the wording across the article imply more than the factual changes. But granted, hooby's comment above is probably more correct than what I wrote.
Given Google's track record, I think it is a sensible evaluation of the situation.
In cases like this, I think it is better to assume malice, even if we are proved wrong later. This is not our fault, this is big tech screwing with us repeatedly for years, with no shame or conscience
I expect there is no difference between an individual and a corporation operated by a sole individual. If one is trustworthy, they will remain equally trustworthy if they happen to have a stock certificate in hand. The corporation isn't able to act autonomously. It acts with equivalency to the person it is represented by.
Large corporations, involving people, is where communication breaks down, which leads to unintended consequences that wouldn't necessarily be realized if an individual was acting alone. When you have people there are bound to be competing interests created in the confusion and it is not always a straightforward answer who is best to honour. Even where intentions are pure humans are bound to make mistakes in their choosing.
If a local dealer does something bad they quickly receive corresponding response.
A big corp is detached and anonymous. As long as there is no broad boycott there are rare cases where response really reaches them.
If a big corp has a sales force the sales force is responsive to feedback, however the corp then quickly turns anonymous to them and whatever they put in the system doesn't reach the right places ...
That conclusion isn't wrong though. Your comment basically claims author is twisting facts but the conclusion remains that giving google.com/maps permission to geotrack does give google.com permission to geotrack.
"Pinky swear I won't enforce that clause" is not reassurance enough.
Do you mind pointing out where you think this applies?
I think I was somewhat wrong in that I may have suggested that you said this was the only reason (which you didn't explicitly) and also in that I dismissed that they factually can use these permissions from other products now, i.e., no matter whether it was intended or not, the permissions set for other products is broader now.
Looking at Heartbleed and other famous security we should know that minor mistakes "disguised" as "typos" can have devastating effects.
They know what theyre doing alright.
Using google.com/XXX for all its services protect the user from being spied by external actors such as ISP because everything is hidden behind HTTPS.
Whereas, with XXX.google.com, external actors knows that you are using service XXX.
As other mentioned, OSM is an alternative (not equivalent) of Google Maps.
https://framapad.org/abc/ (this organisation has a lot of FLOSS cloud alternatives to Google products)
Unfortunately it seems there is only text editing, not spreadsheets or forms (those I use a lot)
But I'll look into it, and probably transfer my docs there
It is important to use user respecting software when we can :)
has everybody forgotten it was replacing Microsoft?
My prosumer grade harder does DPI without any issue.
Regarding the privacy:
If you are using a VPN to protect your privacy, then you are effectively transferring your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. The VPN provider is your new ISP. So you have to make sure you trust the VPN provider more than your ISP.
In my town there are 2 ISP I can choose to trust, whereas with VPN I can choose to trust from a much greater selection.
google.com/maps would result in a DNS request for google.com so anyone monitoring DNS would know they are connecting to a google service but wouldn't know which one.
maps.google.com would result in a DNS request that show they are connecting to maps.google.com and could presume they want some maps.
DoH (and ESNI on the server side) would fix it, but iirc Chrome (the most used browser) doesn't use DoH by default.
Last I checked, Linux was behind other platforms because there’s a lot of complex custom dns configuration that chrome (understandably) didn’t want to be accused of overriding/ignoring, but which isn’t all easily visible to the browser
Even if the computer is using 53/udp to the configured local resolver in the local network, it doesn't mean that the resolver itself is using 53/udp. Many of them can forward queries using DoT/DoH/IPoAC and the app on the users computer will be none the wiser.
Should a browser override system settings? That’s another question, because doing so can impact other things for the avg Joe. For example my mobile providers self serve website plays up when I use custom DNS, free hotspots with captive portals also can be an issue when you override the DNS provided by the access point.
If you want to solve unsafe defaults, this is not the way. Pushing for configuring safe defaults is.
Spock was right, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
However I believe (not read the docs in a while) FireFox works around this by falling back to DNS if an issue with DoH is detected.
EDIT: However I'm still on the fence if it should be a browser decision. Yes browsers move more quickly then OS & ISP changes and can make things better for the masses quickly, but i'm also wary of those changes screwing up the avg person, the people like my mother who can just about order things online via her ipad but thats about it, if she accidentally lowers the screen brightness of her ipad I soon get a call about it. Its for those kind of people I don't like the idea of a browser messing around with a connection in unknown network conditions.
This statement makes a huge assumption, that the DoH provider is more trustworthy than your existing DNS provider. Personally, I trust my ISP (Small, locally owned) with my query history than I trust Google (Massive, exploitative advertising company). The fact that Google is automatically turning this on to scoop up DNS information without users consent should be illegal.
It would fix it for some specific circumstances. Since maps.google.com resolves differently than www.google.com, you can ignore DNS and just look at TCP connections to tell what service is being talked to.
If make a http get request to 142.250.179.238/ (the maps IP) but with the host header set to "www.google.com" I get the search page returned to me. If I make a http get request to 142.250.200.14/maps I get google maps.
OK. /maps might be a bad example because well google.com/maps is already a thing :-p
So if I make a request to 142.250.179.238 with the host youtube.com I get youtube. This is because most of googles public facing servers can act as the front door for many other google services not just the service that its dns is set to.
Not really sure it it comes under "domain fronting" because isn't that tactic many used to bypass censorship, pretend your connecting to one CloudFront customer when really wish to connect to another. Where google explictly configured their services to do this so they can easily load balance as demand and network conditions allow. Anyways I'm rambling now.
My point is, with google you can't rely on the ip address alone to determine the service (however it still wouldn't stop you peeking into connection and pulling out the host header unless ESNI was used) but as I said at the start, Google is more the exception here.
I'm constantly ending up in this view, fighting with it before remembering I need to go to real Google Maps and do my search again.
We'll never know, but if we could find out, say 1 year from now, I'd bet 100:1 that was the main driver.
[1] e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709223#c19
I'd have thought data collected on any of their domains would be meshed/merged behind the scenes where it suits them to do so?
But now google.com will know where he is when he browses it, not just when he uses Google Maps.
I don't have location enabled for Google maps in the browser, but if I did, then presumably Google could collect that data also when I'm just searching for a website.
So it’s now not possible to block location for search, and grant it to maps (at least using the standard browser domain permissions model).
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/114662?hl=en&co=GEN...
I don't know if you can request permissions from the iframe (might confuse people), but if you already have them, it ought to be fine.
[0] https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-permissions-policy/blob/mai...
As you say the UI for requesting in this case would be weird, and this seems like a big security hole to me, but I can’t see a bit of the spec that explicitly forbids (though I only scanned the doc.)
It’s more about the fact that using non map Google services on google.com will not prompt asking for location service permissions, if they’ve been granted when prompted on google.com/maps already.
Users may not want location to be collected for searches, but are okay with the privacy tradeoff for it being collected when using maps.
- is it reasonable for a user to expect that Google will collect all bits of information about them, because Google isn't prevented from doing that?
or
- is it reasonable for a society to allow Google (and competitors) to do this?
I think the answers are respectively yes and no.
Most probable version is that they share as much data as their internal regulations say, or a bit more. They definitely have some form of internal regs on this, for basic security hygiene, but they write it.
You logout and switch to user B to look at another Google service, but google.com is still allowed to get your location, and will stick it to user B, which is something you might not have wanted. This didn't happen with the previous domains, so could be a surprise.
As others have pointed out the line has been blurred between search and maps so far that maps has search embedded, and search has maps embedded. A lot users of Google search likely expect results to be location aware without realising what privacy has been eroded to enable that.
And when they worked, the domain was translate.google.cn instead.
It also means that when you start typing maps.google, you'd get all your history searchable related to maps, although arguably that's useless.
I can't think of a reason why this would be a good technical move for Google (ignoring the don't do evil thingie), other than simplifying... certificates? Less lines in the firewall config... I'm stretching here, help me understand.
More possibility for connection re-use, as you'd only need to have a connection open for www.google.com, not one for each service.
And security wise: ISPs can now only see that you're accessing something at google, but not which service exactly. If they also bring in accounts.google.com into the fold, that would make it harder to see whether you have an account or not.
I don’t buy the simplicity argument for a second. The infrastructure exists, has existed for many years, and is not particularly exotic in the world.
The only thing that matters to a surveillance and advertising company is surveillance and advertising. You don’t need to overthink this one.
Also, I don’t think your reply to the above comment was entirely fair; they didn’t say anything about adding DNS records, and also mentioned several other potential benefits of not using subdomains.
I know you mentioned other things but they’re all sort of in the same bucket of “not that hard once done” and “google can surely do that without blinking an eye”. I would posit the move away from a subdomain to a root domain is hard and complex and benefits end users not one bit. Perhaps the end state is easier on the margins, but again, I doubt given it’s been that way for so long it’s effectively any easier for engineers or operators at google in any way what so ever.
Well, other than those responsible for surveilling all the things.
How does "maps.google.com" imply an application "lives there" any more than "google.com/maps"?
Technically speaking, "google.com/maps" is far superior to "maps.google.com" (check out the rest of the comments in this thread for examples: simpler DNS configuration, simpler certificate management, CORS, cookies, etc).
CORS wasn't designed to "offer any security" in this specific scenario anyway.
By using "google.com/maps" they can simplify their systems (by not worrying caring about CORS).
dns segments are shown backwards for a reason. it was done so that the most specific part shows up first when searching for something.
I have to admit as a data structure snob. I vaguely wish it were the other way around, sigh, as much as I hate to admit it java classes got it right. I also have to admit it does not really matter that much.
Privacy and intimacy,
As we know it,
Will be a memory,
Among many to be passed down
To those who never knew.
Living in the pupil of one thousand eyes.I've added it for clarity.
The only good in-between solution is MagicEarth which supplements OSM maps with data from lord knows where. However although they claim to be privacy cautious they are quite opaque.
Named house rather than a number, and the postcode isn't a particular street but covers a number of little tracks up to various farms.
I also don't have a road name.
The address syntax is:
Building name
Town
County
Post code
The combination of no road and no number means Google absolutely fails. It just gives suggestions of businesses nearby... Ish.
So OSM has decent geographical coverage of the US, but relies very heavily on individual contributors to correct the deficiencies and add useful information to the maps. The only way it will be usable for you is if others have improved it. The only way it will be usable for others is if you jump back in and do the same.
In the EDGE tables it does have ZIP codes and house number ranges, split into left and right side of the road. ZIP codes were imported into OpenStreetMap data. House number ranges are imported into the OpenStreetMap search into a separate database table, so searching works in a lot of areas but it's far from complete, all the issues you mentioned with roads that don't even exist etc
Oauth and user/password, you can try both under plugins/openstreetmap editing/settings/Login to Openstreetmap
The official Telegram support group is also good for getting help:
- "Organic Maps" (a fork of the old MapsMe codebase) if you want a clean, simple user experience
- "OSMAnd" if you want a very powerful, highly customizable map application, which comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve
Both apps are open source and support navigation, offline maps and POI search.
The things I miss most compared to Google Maps is live traffic information and the powerful search. However, this has a privacy cost, so I generally try to use OSM first, and only fall back to Google Maps (in the browser) if I really need to.
By the way, OSMand has some support for reporting traffic issues (police, crashes), but it's very very limited due to low adoption way below a critical mass. Also, reporting traffic status would probably require OSMand to run a pretty beefy server and get the current speed/traffic info from all the users - many chose it exactly because they don't want that.
Thanks!
- go to pugins section and activate the contour lines plugin
- then go to download maps and load the contour lines data for your region
- go to configure map and check the show contour lines option
I think you need the f-droid Version or the paid pro Playstore version or the subscription. Please note that this will only show marked contour lines and not interpolate/estimate the elevation for any point. So you need to search for the next line and get your own idea what that means for the specific location. Not ideal for very flat areas with sparse contour lines.
For the current position you can show GPS elevation (settings, configure screen, widgets)
It's not as good for driving.
Google maps does offer being able to download for offline use, but if you don't have internet it quite often doesn't want to do navigation, unless you trick it with saved directions.
How does Garmin do it (I'm guessing map licencing issue)?
And how come this isn't already a solved issue?
Their Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.here.app.m...
Their Apple app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id955837609
The performance is good (especially on a budget Android device, better than the recent versions of Google Maps, even), they're reasonably accurate (I'm in Eastern Europe) and include navigation, traffic information, public transportation, as well as the ability to save regions for offline browsing.
I can't comment on the company behind it, though, but it's a nice alternative nonetheless (and there are simple prompts for choosing whether you want to send them any data, e.g. to enrich traffic information).
Edit: as a criticism, some Android reviews suggest that recent updates have made the app less performant than previous versions, though I didn't notice anything in particular on my current device (2020 budget phone). Some also suggest that navigation needs more work.
This was a life saver when roaming when data charges were really exorbitant.
Organic and MagicEarth work fine for me. I really wonder if it is just my setup or if everyone else suffers from this. I am on a Pixel 5 with CalyxOS using the OSMAnd+ from Fdroid (but same with normal OSMAnd from Aurora)
The map rendering of OSMAnd is faster than Google Maps (using a 3+ year old smart phone with a low-end Realtek SoC). Like really way way faster/snappier.
My setup is a Chinese brand Android 10 with default OS (rooted)and OSMAnd+ from Fdroid.
The only possible cause I could think of is that CalyxOS is somehow missing proper video drivers for your Pixel?
https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/12046 https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/13254
Edit: If that is not the culprit then check if OpenGL rendering is activated.
You can also deactivate unneeded features from being rendered (buildings, areas, etc). And lastly there are smaller road-only maps (no POI data and no adresses though)
What really matters is the amount of data. In my local town I can scroll around no problem, but in a more actively mapped area like Amsterdam it takes at least couple seconds to load.
I wish more applications were like it, first thing I install on my phone.
I think at the moment there's a massive discount on OsmAnd+. Worth it?
I live about 1 mile from suburbs in a town called Bingley in Yorkshire, England.
I can't trust Google maps locally (though its good for local business searches), as the mapping quality is terrible. My village and local town have roads missing, numerous public rights of way missing (over both public and private land). Major areas of trees missing. OSM is much, much better.
See the difference:
https://ibb.co/fk74k3s https://ibb.co/GTKMTzn
I am noticing more and more how poor Google maps is for non-drivers (such as myself recently having to stop driving), such as not being able to do walking routes over local foot bridges, OSM with OSRM or Grasshopper is fine:
Is this usable on mobile? Can you tell a bit more?
prediction: osm will eventually surpass wikipedia as the most successful crowdsourced effort because the more objective and simple nature of its data allows dramatic scaling. if even 1% of the billions of the world's roaming mobile devices get into the habbit of augmenting the osm database (e.g. using streamlined UI's like streetcomplete or yet to be build apps) the disruption will be on its way
but on your real point, yes its going to be a long slog...
It is an example of how companies are dying to permission to track is.
It may have been ok to fall for that argument for 10 years, but after AMP, manifestv3, android's location log disaster, the recording of wifi names and countless lawsuits across the globe, it seems that the resource of good faith assumptions has been depleted. Some may even say that trusting google (the corporation) to act on technical or altruistic reasons is delusional.
Tangentially, it's funny how the whole Google+ fiasco with forcing G+ account creation for YT etc. was quickly forgotten.
Also Google: decides to use single domain so any permission you ever give work for all of their apps
Deny: google.com/*
Allow: google.com/flights
If you use Firefox, assume your location is always shared with Mozilla via telemetry... and likely indirectly to Google as well, since they use Google Analytics for so much of their infra.
Likewise for Apple/Google/Microsoft collecting data from iOS/macOS/Android/Windows. And of course your cellular provider.
As far as I know the only way to ensure your personal data isn't shared with your browser publisher is to use a verifiable, open source browser that has telemetry disabled, like Iceweasel or Librewolf. And an open source, verifiable OS with telemetry disabled, like... Fedora, maybe? Manjaro? But you're being spied on by your ISP or cellular provider anyway, and the US government indirectly through your ISP and cell provider. And let's be honest, foreign governments through some combination of ISP/cellular provider/govt backdoors.
Oh, and if you've read "Trusting Trust" you'll know that even OSS isn't necessarily verifiable unless you wrote the compiler yourself from scratch.
So I'm not sure there's much benefit to any of it?
And even a compiler you wrote yourself from scratch isn't necessarily verifiable unless you designed from scratch the hardware that you used to write it. Almost nobody knows what those Management Engines are doing!
But some home routers are behind CGNAT infrastructure: Then it's possible that TCP connections from the same browser can go through different public IP addresses.
Sharing the location helps Google to help users. And Google to target ads better.
How would you always know your current address? I often use maps with gps to find out where I am. Many places have no address.
The difference that might break this analogy being that with a mega-app there isn't really a diversity of revenue streams despite the diversity of products/features: it all comes down to stalking to be able to better sell advertising.
Set-Cookie: name=value; domain=google.com
It also means if app X and app Y on their own subdomains were previously using location APIs without any tricks, you are now effectively opting into both apps.
Bottom line: technically it doesn't matter but it probably makes a difference in practice.
With separate domains we could allow notifications for one (e.g calendar) and disallow for another (e.g mail) at the browser level.
Seems like it would now be a blanket allow for all of google.com (with a toggle for each product setting, maybe?) which sounds like a very user hostile move.
I guess it depends if one considers Google products to be separate apps or Google as a whole to be a "Web OS".
(Also on the technical side there's not just google.com but also google.<2 letter country TLD>, which is even worse in terms of CORS, certs, or whatever. Would they get rid of that?)
I wish browsers had a more granular way to grant this and other permissions. E.g. Firefox just has allow/deny, and then "remember".
Granting it only if the user clicks the "show my location" UI element on the web page would be a closer match to user expectations, and would preclude pages from getting the permission in the background.
Of course that would introduce extra complexity, e.g. worrying about web pages sneakily making normal looking links the "get location" UX element.
There's probably no secure way to do it except for the webpage to communicate that it's a page that might want your location, and for the browser to show the "send my location" UX element itself (e.g. in the toolbar).
Gmail is currently branded as part of Google Workspace, and shows the Workspace logo upon sign in. It probably has been that way architecturarly for a long time, but I think they have made it more explicit relatively recently, at least for non-corporate users.
It looks like "Google for Work" is an old name of Google Workspace.
There may have been other reasons as well, but I have been strongly inclined to consider this a hostile and even malicious action (organisationally, if not individually) from the start, more than the maps.google.com → www.google.com/maps shift (though I think it’s still at least hostile).
Thus you probably can’t quite block even www.google.com even if you never use any Google services yourself.
https://imgur.com/gallery/LleCkEo
I hate this and don’t want to see it ever again. Allow always, allow never, I don’t care. This reminds me of the GDPR popups… I feel like once you have popups everywhere, they lose their value and become an annoyance
I don't think Google needed to do this move to track you across their services. Pretty sure they were able to do that before.
As others have pointed out, there are technical benefits too – but most (all?) of these technical benefits are essentially because it works around features designed to limit the scope of permissions.
https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:9&tbm=lcl&q=clo...
This looks like maps but it's not, it's search, so the UI is different. Features I expect from "maps" are missing
If there is an XSS attack that leaks cookies from Google Keep, you would prefer that not get your cookie for Google Maps.
As browser security models have evolved, subdomains are no longer as isolated as top level domains, so I dunno...
There should really be a more granular way for the user's policy to adjust the origin definitions used for cross-origin logic as well as other types of content blocking and enforcement.
Why shouldn't a user be able to isolate https://example.com/app1 as much as https://app1.example.com?
Why shouldn't they be able to grant any permission to be used in a single page https://example.com/app1/usefulpage and not in other pages on the site?
The multi-container approach to browser session isolation faces the same issues. Different users may have different preferences for when navigation shares the session and when navigation should kick you into a new session that lacks authentication, tracking, or app state.
IP-based geolocation isn't very reliable. And if people are using VPNs then it's useless.
I'm in Asia btw.
No.
Hmm this is a smart move indeed, all of a sudden I'm logged into G-maps whereas I wasn't before... FireFox helpfully opened google.com/maps in my Google container...
google.com has now direct access to your location, it doesn't need any cookies.
(Of course it can probably make a pretty good guess, just as well it could do before this change.)
This morning I looked for a similar extension for Google and I've found this fork[1] of Mozilla's extension. It's working as expected so far but I'd love for it to be officially maintained by Mozilla at some point. There is an open issue about it[2].
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook
I've tried to avoid logging into my Google account on Safari on my iPhone because I am scared of them tracking me, but I also wanted to use the Google Keep app for sharing a shopping list with my partner.
But when you launch the Google Keep app, iOS asks you whether you want to allow the app to share data with "google.com". It turns out that there is no way to sign into the Google Keep app without also signing into Google in Safari! I don't know how this works, but it is horrible! If I want to use a Google app on my phone, I basically have to give them permission to track me everywhere!
If you're wondering why you're getting downvoted it's because this isn't true at all. I'm signed into (several) iOS google apps and my Safari browser is not signed into google.
All I know is that I was not able to sign into Google Keep without accepting the data sharing prompt, and I was signed into my Google account in Safari after logging into the Google Keep app. It was of course possible to sign out of Safari afterwards.
I don't know how to reproduce the issue. I've tried uninstalling the Google Keep app, to trigger the alert again, but when I reinstall the app it remembers my Google account!
I'm really surprised how hard it is to get these cookies or app preferences or whatever off my device after signing in once.
EDIT: It seems the Google Keep app stores my account in the iOS keychain and there is no way to delete the item from the keychain without deleting all data on the phone, so I can't reproduce the "new device" situation easily.
However, if I try to add a new account, I get the same dialog. It says something like (rough translation) "Google Keep wants to use google.com for logging in. If you allow this, the app and the website are allowed to share data about your person".
If I tap "cancel" in this alert, I can't log in.
So as far as I can tell, what I said is correct. Maybe it was different in the past, but this is what the situation on iOS 16 currently looks like.
from:City, ST to:Town, ST
This was a joke, but now I'm wondering if Google services are special cases that are hard-coded in the search results. Or are they just treated like normal websites and use the same pagerank algorithm as every other site? If I search for "maps", I see Google Maps at the top, and Apple Maps in second place, but they both look like regular website links.
We might see Google services' rankings punished on Google from now on...
"What do I have to hide?" was always the response...
[0] http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-...
Edit: It's possible my concern was the subdomain and my memory is off. It moved from a subdomain to a /gmail at one point (or something similar). That is when I swore off it.
What clearly recall is that there was something wrong, either it was how it did a redirect to google.com first and then back or shared cookies in a very sneaky way that alerted me. (I was building sites at the time and I was privacy conscience early on in my career)
> As of 22 June 2005, Gmail's canonical URI changed from http://gmail.google.com/gmail/ to http://mail.google.com/mail/.
As you can see from your own source, the canonical URL has always been under google.com, not under gmail.com.
Edit: the parent post was originally linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail, before being edited
Therefore, gmail.google.com could track cookies and activity via google.com.
This has been fixed since then, so I think the memory of the internet is short and wouldn't understand how bad this was in retrospect.
(my previous edits: Yep, I didn't want to drag this out. My memory was off on something.)
On my PC this is happening since years!
Any suggestions for an good open street maps app on iOS?
Offline capability would be a huge plus.
DNS-based content-blocker are woefully inadequate. I'd know since I co-maintain one and the barrage of complaints I get make it plenty clear where unaddressable limitations lie.
If in order to not let all of Google have your location information you need to opt out of letting maps have your location information it might be a GDPR problem. Considering also that this was not a problem that people had before if indeed it is a problem now it might be taken as a wilful circumvention of GDPR.
I’m not a lawyer but my interpretation of this is that consent for Google to use location data for maps doesn’t allow them to use that same location data for email.
> Consent should cover all processing activities carried out for the same purpose or purposes. When the processing has multiple purposes, consent should be given for all of them.