You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me.
Full disclosure I work at Google, not on Maps, and I always did the suggest a change with my personal account.
I've had a road that is mis-named near me. I've used the "suggest a change" feature multiple times, but have never gotten a response other than the automated "it'll be reviewed". Road is still mis-named.
Other changes i've suggested have gone through in hours.
I ask the labelling of a school on the map, specifying the name and providing the home town site as proof (a page listing all schools with their adresses and picture), and two days later it was labelled as “<Name of the town> school” completely ignoring the provided info and making the spot misleading. Requests for correction a few months apart didn’t do anything at this point.
So I can vouch for the process sometimes working, and I have nothing to do with Google. Now, why, when and how it works is a complete mystery.
Even when you're dealing with their non-public products!
Every holiday, Google reminds me I need to check the holiday hours for our business on the Google My Business page. So I do.
Every time, despite being the only authorized user on this page and despite the changes I make being nothing strange (things like being closed on christmas, and not to mention their system asked me to check it)......it sits there saying "pending review" for a week or more.
I don't really know what to think about it when they don't trust the business page's actual manager to get the info correct.
OSM strongly discourages the mapping of trap streets — fake streets that only exist on your map for unscrupulous competition to copy so you know that they did so — but it's possible that some mappers do put these on the map. I don't think one of the big proprietary maps has ever been caught copying one of these though.
I added a placemark in OSM in the middle of Bali, Indonesia for an Internet cafe a few years ago, and it's currently also in Google Maps. (The cafe has since been closed for a few years.)
What's interesting is that's why I added it to OSM - to get picked up by Google Maps. :)
What's even more interesting is that when I told people in SV that I was doing that, they told me since it was a copyright violation, Google Maps wouldn't do that. :) :)
I wonder if it would be easier to just change the street signs rather than convince Google to make the correction.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/czech-prime-minister-wants-to-k...
Even in the same area. A neighborhood name was added, but the street name change in that same neighborhood wasn't.
Why do we allow these tech giants to treat us so disgracefully?
Because we've already been conditioned to accept this kind of behavior from our local governments.
My home address is wrong on Google Maps. It's correct on our national postal services' postcode system, but that only covers public post: most private couriers use Google for some reason. As do Uber/delivery drivers/taxis/etc. I live in an urban centre (Dublin, home of Google's EU HQ) so it's not some obscure rural farm.
I've used their suggest a change feature within Maps pretty much every month since I've lived here and even received automated responses telling me the suggestion has been "processed" or similar. No change to the map though.
You say you work for Google, so you must know that the company you work for amasses huge amounts of information on billions of people on the internet. It then uses that information to sell personalized ads to these people. Advertisers love that, and they pay the rates, and that's how Google makes money for your paycheck — and much more.
What makes you think they "require" any action on the part of these people to "create associations" between accounts? They are making billions by doing it because they can.
Do you have any evidence that Google spies on its own employees for the purpose of giving them privileged manual treatment when they don't ask for it?
Do you have any evidence that Google create associations between separate Google accounts to the extent of treating them as the same accountholder (asside from deleting duplicate spam accounts)?
For months after that, Google bombarded me with the links to the disease and cures and remedies and whatnot.
I remember even seeing that at my kid's gaming PC, and I don't remember ever logging in to my Google account there. We only shared the same IP in the household.
That's pretty anecdotal, I know, but that's what there is.
Obtuse af. Is this default assumption that the user is the one who has to "create" associations in the company's systems based on anything? The big tech cos have been social mapping since before 2012 and they undoubtedly register when two accounts use the same IP.
It also makes the simple connection that a user also has a google.com account without doing anything special.
Although I suspect they do have something home built as every single company I’ve worked for with a broad customer facing product has had some flag to note employee accounts. I built this sometimes and was usually to help understand if some random suggestion was from a bigwig worth looking up. You never want to be in a situation where “Ms So and So, EVP of some department you don’t know submitted a question a week ago and got no answer. She mentioned it to me at the EVP monthly hobo hunt, yadda yadda yadda.”
And saying "hobo hunt" shows you obviously aren't engaging in serious conversation.
I was trying to convey that Google just already tracks all linked email accounts so it seems natural that they would be able to trivially identify or prioritize inbound suggestions from employees.
I also wanted to say that even if they did build a custom system to sort employees, it’s not hard. It’s not a super secret tech, but something I’ve personally implemented in an afternoon 20 years ago, so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s easy to do. If they want to.
I added the “hobo hunt” joke as I think infusing humor in arbitrary engagements makes it easier to engage in serious conversation. And all my serious conversations involve humor. Of course, I seriously doubt that any company executives routinely engage in hunting homeless persons and used something extremely absurd and impossible.
Creating a system to secretly map my work account and my personal account in order to prioritize my Maps suggestions seems like a huge amount of work for no benefit whatsoever.
E.g. a coffeeshop has a constant stream of accounts on its IP that appear only once or twice. So it might be considered "a public place". So no association is done over accounts arriving from that IP. Your home, OTOH, might have only two accounts on its IP for years, so the association here is stronger.
A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.
The system might not be created "to prioritize Maps suggestions" only and has multiple benefits in other places. Most obvious of these is to prevent people banned from the service to come back with a different account.
(I don't work at G and never did, but worked at another place where we linked accounts.)
>A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.
I never use the same browser for my work and personal accounts. But in theory that could run into the spousal problem as well for some people.
In short, the amount of data you are passing to Google, willingly or not, allows them to link these to a single person — you — with an extremely high certainty.
It's not just Google. Other GPS maps will send you to my house on a road that hasn't really been passable for 30 or 40 years - if you make the mistake of not telling it to avoid dirt roads. But, if you tell it to stick to paved roads, it'll have you park about 2 km away.
I have no idea how to fix this, except to suggest that they update the maps that the GPS relies on. It's such a remote area that it's not a priority for them. Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.
It's a privacy issue to use that kind of data, because the employees who build the map shouldn't be looking at one guys GPS traces. So instead the traces are cut into tiny chunks and aggregated and only shown where there are more than 50 people at the same spot. That effectively means there is no data available to make decisions on the most rarely used roads.
Also, even if they choose to not do this for maps even though they do it for lots of other things, merely aggregate traffic info on roads would be useful. 364 days of zero traffic and one day with 30 minutes of one car would be useful.
The same algo that does that could tell the field mapper to go look at roads that are barely used (or whatever criteria ends up being the best), it doesn't need to tell them how many people or who went on that road.
Sometimes I think that Google create their road maps solely using satellite pictures.
How does Google tell the difference between someone on an electric bike vs a car going on a dirt road doing 20-30km/h to not have rocks flying everywhere?
With all the sensors in the phone, it is not that hard. There's a lot of research in that field...
The best approach I could think of is they expand the time they're looking at to classify the vehicles before the outlier situations.
> Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong.
A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Probably not. At least one person dies each year in the Mojave Desert because they were following an electronic map instead of a paper map. It's in the local news most times it happens.
The right answer is for users not to be brainlessly following whatever their corpo device tells them to be the truth.
We had to get a change made to Google maps to prevent people getting killed here, and it took national news, and personal contacts within the organisation.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
I think this is the right approach. Why do free ground-proofing for a for-profit company? (Who is also so unresponsive). Better to submit fixes to a community project.
A friend of mine just bought a property in regional Australia, and Maps wants to send anyone going to going to his place via forestry roads and then across two private properties to get there, despite having main road access.
Once in another part of Oz, we were sent up a cliff face, in the middle of the night, and it took an hour and a half to correct it's mistake.
Every time I try and "fix" maps by reporting it, and very very very rarely is it fixed
Another property has two "crown roads" on it, but to all purposes, they're very dangerous 4wd trails, again thru private property. The owner has signs, but the belligerent and unaware swear by the Goog, insisting it's correct.
I prefer paper maps over the Google rubbish.
Hiking in Hong Kong, Google maps disagreed with the route I was attempting to take on Sir Cecil's Ride back around the back side of the rock quarry. Google maps took us across the front face of the quarry, past the police shooting range / Explosive Ordinance Disposal Depot, and up a sheer rock face next to the quarry with the assistance of a cobbled-together rope some kind soul left for others, then through a bamboo thicket that cut my wife's legs up. My wife no longer insists on following Google maps if it disagrees with the hiking route I'm planning.
-- Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, 2009 edition, section 2A.04, paragraph 01
Replace 'signs' with anything--no one's patience/attention will hold up in the face of a constant barrage of information.
Cue Googler who will find this comment and magically fix this problem. The HN effect.
If that has been done, then it simplifies the dispute as you can objectively verify whether the complaint matches the official data and Google should not be routing cars there, or if the maps are correct and the appropriate solution would not involve Google - e.g. if a road is physically impassable then complaints to whoever is responsible for maintaining that road; if there are barriers or "do not enter" signs on a legally public road, then complaints to the authorities to remove these barriers and punish whoever put them up, if a path is marked public but you think it shouldn't be then legal action to try and correct it (which may or may not succeed), etc.
Yes, you absolutely could lobby for someone to write a law requiring Google to respond to nuisance requests from their navigation services. That is basically what DMCA does, after all.
Hypothetical example law: OK, you have a good-faith presumption up until someone emails you a copy of a deed and proves it's their driveway, then you legally need to correct it within X days or penalties start to rack up.
In my area, it sees like some of the driveways have turned into roads because of overly helpful contributors.
Fixing it in OSM fixed it slowly in all drivers navigation systems and after a year no deliveries were lost anymore
They can look in some government maps, depending on the licenses.
[1]: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/615/can-google-maps...
But they do not make wide use of OSM data, because one of the terms of the license is attribution, of which there is none on any Google product I have seen.
I would guess they are big supporters of OSM as a hiring thing - by supporting an opensource project, you will get young engineers interested in mapping, some of which will then go work on Google Maps.
It also helps any antitrust cases if Google isn't the only game in town, which was the case for many years.
I get the problems are both of the same origin, but the discussion has a much better chance of making progress and getting Google's attention which is hard to do when people's lives are at stake. Or when they have been lost directly due to their own oversights.
Seems to be the Google way of doing things: they can't do everything with algorithms!
there is a situation similar to this near me and it has caused damages and near fatalities as vehicles moving 50 mph roar down the driveway, round the bend and suddenly there are people, a well head a house and a seafright container up front and center.
Love the whole "nothing can be measured, who can say!?" attitude on Google of all fucking things. They log everything and delete nothing. Yes, they absolutely do know how many people they've routed down that person's driveway, and a subpoena/discovery would clear it right up.
Technically you could make the argument that the map directions are incitement/solicitation to commit a crime. But I doubt you’d get a prosecutor to pick up that case.