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Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

I'm clueless about mapping/geocoding/etc (it's amazing I make it to the grocery store and back) but I keep hearing that Apple needed to get this out there so that they could start getting data feeding back from the millions of iOS users, and thus (presumably rapidly) improving the quality of the maps. Is there any truth at all to that? I don't quite understand where they'd be getting that data back from - e.g. if I search for the hospital and I eventually find it 3 miles down the road from where the map took me, how would Apple/their mapping partners ever know that the POI should be moved?

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e.g. if I search for the hospital and I eventually find it 3 miles down the road from where the map took me, how would Apple/their mapping partners ever know that the POI should be moved?

One possibility is that the phone keeps track of the fact that "you drove 3 miles past where you were 'supposed' to stop, and then stopped at some other (specific) location."

As more and more people do that --- search the hospital, drive past it, and stop at the same specific location != the phone's predicted location --- then, statistically, we can infer that the "specific location" that everyone eventually stops at is, in fact, the location of the actual hospital.

Interestingly, this implies that the current mapping problems will eventually sort themselves out... after annoying a sufficient number of customers!

There are lot of privacy problems with essentially having every iphone phone home with where it is all the time.

I'd wager that the phone sends back "areas" rather than GPS coordinates. So rather than the phone reporting "My owner was at (lat,long) at 3:21PM!" it would instead report "My owner came within range of Starbucks' Wifi Hotspot at 3:19PM, and left at 3:23PM!"

In reality Apple has been doing exactly this type of thing since iOS 4 was deployed[1], so unfortunately the privacy problems are apparently very easy to sidestep.

[1] http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+is+Tracking+its+iPhone+iPad+U...

Weren't they going to use user locations in their traffic update service?

Not to mention battery problems from having the GPS and wireless data going constantly.

You tell them using the Report Problem button....

You can report incorrect POI. Of course, that requires you to remember to do that, when most likely you're sitting worried in hospital after hunting around for a while.

Most of the locations here are probably sourced directly from their data providers they list, including Acxiom and Factual. At this scale, they probably haven't geocoded each place themselves.

What experience I've had with those data sources makes me unsurprised that there are misplaced businesses.

They have been wanted to get Google Maps out of the picture because of the wealth of user location data it was collecting.

I doubt that data is being collected to help users with "more accurate maps", but probably "more accurate advertising".

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