Apple Maps wrongly lists restaurant permanently closed, costing owner thousands
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Apple's terms and EULA don't matter, because the injured party is not an Apple customer.
I would hope that any such lawsuit would be thrown out, unless this is a particularly widespread issue, or Apple intended to harm this business. This seems like an honest mistake on Apple's part, perhaps because someone reported the business as closed.
What do you want Apple to do? Personally verify every edit to every business on Maps?
Anyone with an iPhone, Mac or web browser can do so and I've done it dozens of time because as everyone knows the POI quality is terrible.
And it's really not hard to interact with Apple here in Australia. You can either call their support number which goes direct to a person or visit an Apple Store.
Google maps can be used from all platforms...
Anyway, I don't own a Mac or iPhone. I guess if I was a small business owner and Apple Maps had wrong information about my business I'd just be out of luck.
And so instead I'm supposed to call some support number and wait on hold to talk to someone who has no idea how to fix my problem, and bounces me around for a while until the connection accidentally disconnects? Yeah, no. I think you overestimate how much time she'll business owners have to deal with this sort of garbage.
I don't really understand why that would be too big of an ask for one of the wealthiest companies in the world, but at the very least, I'd expect Apple to yield to the authority of the business operator when changing the status to closed. Seems like a pretty solid reason for a lawsuit imo. I'm sure Apple would feel the same way if someone changed all of the Apple store retail locations to "Permanently Closed" on Google Maps and nobody checked it.
Yes, you do need an Apple device to use Maps, but it's at least a viable alternative to Google that casual users pick (versus, say, OpenStreetMaps).
How much is the cost to continually verify every business on Maps? I would expect it to be a very large amount. If it were very expensive, would Apple have created Maps, or keep Maps operating? I don't know.
I guess what I'm getting at is that Apple doesn't get much direct gain (as far as I know -- maybe they get some money from Yelp?) from Maps, and I'm rooting for Apple because at least they're not Google.
How does Apple Maps exploit users? As we've discussed, you must first own an Apple device. Does Apple Maps sell data or advertise or something?
And if not, then perhaps they at least have a moral duty. Even if Apple were fined for something like this, likely the fine would be cheaper than ensuring compliance would cost. Meanwhile, a restaurant losing customers for a week because people think it's closed could bankrupt their business.
If Apple Maps isn't available to to people without Apple devices, it's not free.
You can. DuckDuckGo uses it as their provider. https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=1600+pennsylvania+ave&ia=web...
Albeit as a developer OpenStreetMaps offers better experience
It's like google maps ten years ago... Well no, they already had itineraries.
Why do people act like human moderation would be such an untenable burden? These tech companies are GIGANTIC, they can afford to do human moderation.
Almost every car accident is an honest mistake. Does that mean that the at fault driver should not have to fix the harm caused because they didn’t mean to cause it?
Not true. Many, probably most, car collisions are caused by negligently disregarding if not wilfully exceeding the speed limit, negligently disregarding an obligation to yield to other traffic, illegally operating a phone while driving, or some combination thereof.
I’m just using a colloquial term for people whose actions are neither intentional or malicious to make the point that you can be held responsible for damages you didn’t foresee or intend to cause.
Rarity of the event does not comfort the victim.
> or Apple intended to harm this business
No one cares what they "intended" to do, only what was done.
> What do you want Apple to do?
I want them to pay the guy who they harmed.
> Personally verify every edit to every business on Maps?
That's absolutely right. This isn't Open Street Maps where anyone including the business owner himself can edit the information. Apple's reponsible for this.
To me that would imply small businesses that can't afford the time to go through such a process would be hard pressed to stay listed.
The deep pockets and scale of the damage Big Corp can do against a small player is extensive.
This sounds very much like "I want to be automatically included in these map services, but I don't want to do any work to ensure accuracy".
In terms of "company with lots of money should be able to manually verify every entry", I can't find info on Apple Maps, but at a general approximation of scale google talks about 200 million businesses and points of interest[2], yelp alone has 5 million[3] and operates in a relatively small area.
Let's be conservative and say apple is at 50 million. Let's guesstimate 5 minutes per verification and now you have 250 million minutes of work just to validate this information once. Assuming a 40 hours per week, that would require 2000+ people full time employees doing nothing but calling to constantly [re-]verify business information. That would be (according to wikipedia) a 1% increase in the number of employees for the entire company, just for information that could easily be kept more accurate by the business owner. For google's 200 million PoIs you obviously require 8000 full time employees which for them would be a 6% increase in their work force.
It's super easy to say "well these companies have lots of money and so should be able to be 100% accurate", but the scale of these services does not actually make that true, especially when there are systems that allow business owners to just report the correct information directly.
[1] For whatever it's worth wikipedia says it gets information "provided by approximately twenty companies, including Booking.com, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, and Yelp" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps
[2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/how-goo...
[3] https://gitnux.org/yelp-statistics/#:~:text=Yelp%20has%20mor....
No, the publisher doesn't get to be off the hook because "it's hard to be accurate."
My guess is that Apple et al have contracts which indemnify them and if he is the ultimate source, he's already signed away any right to damages for information he provided (and maybe information he didn't).
What difference does the scale make? Just look at the unit economics. If they can't afford to spend 5 minutes verifying this data point before sending it out to thousands or millions of users, maybe they shouldn't be sending it out at all; that's true whether you have 1 data point or 1 billion. If they're going to make the effort to publish it, they should make the effort to verify it. Or if they think their accuracy rate without verification is "good enough", they should accept the consequences of that and pay fair compensation when they screw up.
On Google Maps anyone can submit a correction. Business owners can also sign up for an account, verify ownership with a mailed postcard, and then claim and protect their listing from rogue edits.
How does it work on Apple?
A friend these days reported that a Starbucks closed¹. Apple ignored the report, said it needed additional info...
He had to take a photo and send it, only them they approved...
With Google Maps, there's level system, where people with higher level can fix these issues easier... Not sure if Apple do the same.
One of the better things about the old internet was the collaborative effort to build up information, but we should not contribute to closed systems anymore.
If Google or Apple wants that information they can figure out how to get it themselves or pay users. It's not our duty to help them scale
However, until and unless that happens, I still find tremendous value in Google Maps, as do many people I know.
> It's not our duty to help them scale
No, but editing Google Maps also helps a ton of real users, even if Google also happens to profit from it. For the last two decades, Google Maps has been free and used by millions (billions?) of people around the world, myself and most of my friends and family included. More than any other similar service (OSM, TripAdvisor, Yelp, OrganicMaps, county/city GIS, Apple Maps, in-car GPS, standalone GPS, etc.), this has been my go-to mapping & location service, and IMHO it is Google's single best service. Simply put, they do a REALLY good job at it, and it provides unparalleled accuracy and ease of use.
The crowdsourced corrections part of it is huge, and not that different from us contributing our opinions here on HN (also a for-profit corporation), or reviewing things on Yelp/Metacritic/whatever, or providing our Android traffic data, etc. Yes, corporations profit from all of that, but they still provide valuable community services. I've seen local businesses gain customers after I updated their listing, delivery drivers find their way after I corrected misplaced pins, etc. It affects and improves my local communities, even as Google profits. Editing OSM doesn't do that, because nobody I know uses it.
For me this isn't about "duty" or purity of ethics, just about having a useful & good app to find places and get to them. Again, it's a network effect... it is useful to edit Google Maps because everyone else uses it, and edits it, and in so doing we have a accurate global POI database unmatched by any other effort.
Nobody obliges you to use Google Maps. But I'm a very happy user of it, and would gladly pay for it if it weren't free (in fact I wish they offered a paid plan to skip the ads). Do I wish it were a FOSS product run by a nonprofit? Sure. But OSM hasn't caught up in two decades, and it probably won't in my lifetime... if anything the gap between it and Google keeps getting bigger, as Maps gets more and more features and OSM falls further and further behind =/
I edit OSM on occasion but it's just so bad it's not really usable for me day to day. On the other hand, it's super rare for a Google Maps listing to be totally wrong (vs the pin just being off by a bit), and their corrections UI is way way better than the OSM editor. It takes me like half an hour to edit a feature in OSM that would take about 1 min on Google Maps.
You could use one of those two apps, editing a POI with them does not take half an hour.
StreetComplete seems to be gamified and only wants to show me "quests". I couldn't figure out how to edit a specific business that wasn't a current quest. I poked around for a few min and then gave up.
Every Door didn't show me anything at all until I manually downloaded the data, then had a pretty bad UI for editing the operating hours, not even localized to my time locales (12hr time). The time picker is horrendous too. I don't think I can stand this UI, sorry.
And when I tried to edit actual vector features on the web-based OSM editor (both of them, or whatever the difference is) it was a much more annoying experience than doing the same thing (like editing a road) on Google Maps.
The GMap editor is just much more polished and doesn't require me to go out of my way to make a trivial edit -- as you'd expect from a company with nearly infinite resources.
I'm sorry, I get that OSM is a great project, but it's just not something worth my time to try to fix. I've checked in on it (and contributed here and there, once in a great while) since its founding nearly 20 years ago, but I've never found it to have good enough data for day-to-day use, nor easy enough editing features to be worth the hassle. I'm happy it exists, but it's just not something I care enough to regularly contribute to... with limited time, it's just more useful for me to use Google Maps. Sorry, it's selfish, and not idealistic at all, but just being pragmatic. Nobody else I know uses it, either. Everyone I know uses Google Maps, so fixing it there has a cascading effect of usefulness for my entire social circle, like when we want to go to a shared location, I can make sure the pin is where it's supposed to be.
Every Door has a very good UI for editing `opening_hours` in my opinion, as it can do pretty arbitrary complicated hours easily. But I also get that it's not for everyone.
I also get your last point, about useful- and pragmaticness. I live in a country in Europe where roaming is prohibitively expensive, so use offline OpenStreetMap abroad a lot, with different apps, mostly https://organicmaps.app This has been really useful in Europe, but I have no idea on the status/freshness of OpenStreetMap data in other regions.
We're the ones responsible for it being great or terrible. Somebody's gotta input that data into the map. By somebody I mean us, it's not gonna be there if we don't put it in there. It's a lot of work but it benefits everyone.
If you see outdated information, update it!
It would be nice if there was a system/app that can correlate POIs across services, normalize their schemas, and then update all of them at once with one edit.
I'm level 6/10 in that system (several hundred contributions, a few million views) and it's totally hit or miss for me. Some edits go through instantly, others take a few minutes, some take a few weeks or months. Some are peer reviewed, others aren't. It's not a very transparent system and there's no way to track them once you submit it, you just eventually get an email (or not) if it goes through or is rejected.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/introducing-apple-bus...
>Apple today introduced Apple Business Connect, a free tool that allows businesses of all sizes to claim their location place cards and customize the way key information appears to more than a billion Apple users across Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet, Siri, and other apps.
To their credit, they're usually quick to turn around and update the info (or follow up for additional evidence that the correction is accurate)
I live at 123 My Street, and there's a nearby 123 East My Street about two miles north.
If I say "Hey Siri, directions to Home", and I'm north of both of them, it'll direct me to the wrong place. If I'm south, it'll take me to the correct home. (The closest one, it'd seem.) Same thing even if I type the exact correct address into Apple Maps.
If they are in the same city you could ask the city to rename your street 123 My Street South or something?
How about Apple figure out that streets with different but similar names exist? Or store "home" as a coordinate instead of an address?
Thankfully there's a school right next door, so I've learned to just ask for that.
Once upon a time I used to add data to Google Maps because they dangled some bullshit Google Drive space in front of me as a reward. No longer.
Van you explain why JOSM ? Never tried. I've used most mobile editors and the Web Id editor.
When I wanted to make detailed edits to points and the relationships between them, I often found that only JOSM supported what I wanted to do.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Advanced_editing
Splitting and combining ways are very common tasks that are trivial in JOSM but proved to be quite difficult if not impossible in other editors. Relations are used to add information such as road turn restrictions, editing these relations is essentially impossible in any editor other than JOSM.
So there's a good chance someone didn't locate the restaurant at the indicated location, then as a result, marked it closed.
No idea how that happened of course, and the article does report that even people correctly using the business owner tools to try to fix it are unsuccessful, but it does show how keeping your maps entries up to date is both critical for small physical businesses, and hard for many of them.
It's also important to keep your business hours up to date on any mapping platform commonly used in your area. Having out of date business hours not only loses customers or frustrates them, a customer standing in front of the business while it's supposed to be open according to the maps entry but is actually closed might press the button to mark it as "permanently closed" either because they confused it with the proper button, or out of spite because they're frustrated that they went there in vain. Sure, map providers should have a review process for it, but the graveyards are filled with people who had the right of way, and it will affect your business much more than theirs if you get hit by this.
[1] OpenStreetMap
Apple could do better here to make it easier for restaurant owners to keep their information up-to-date. I imagine this situation would be particularly frustrating for anyone non-technical.
I think that errors like these are inevitable, though. It's probably not possible to map the entire world's restaurants without making mistakes.
They have a portal at https://businessconnect.apple.com.
I just updated a business and it took about 30s.
So you weren't unable to do it, you made a choice to rely on automated systems getting the right information through scraping or whatever they do. That's your choice, but you don't get to then act like it was not possible to do the task.
That's like saying "I tried to rent a car from hertz but that's no actually possible. They asked for a 'license'".
No, that's nothing like what it's like.
It's like "I woke up this morning and there's a Hertz car parked in my front lawn, but when I call Hertz to tell them about the problem, they won't talk to me unless I sign a contract with them."
If that's the blocker, you'll just have to rely on Apple to update Apple's business information directory, or get a friend to do it, or simply click "Report an Issue" when using Apple Maps.
For years, my house was listed as being about a mile away - I have fought with Google and Apple to get these changed so delivery services don't mis-deliver.
Looking for a place to eat in downtown SF always requires sifting through multiple listings for "permanently closed" restaurants that have indeed been closed, for a decade. Why do those still need to appear on the default view?
On the other hand, a new record store just opened up in North Beach recently - already on Google Maps but, of course, still missing on Apple Maps this weekend.