One way I commonly use google maps is as a restaurant or bar finder. Like "show me open restaurants around me". I even do this when at home and feel like eating out for whatever reason. I don't want to walk too far away or take transit. I just want to see the restaurants in a 10-minute walk radius around where I am which are open and what they serve. Now, sure, I'd like to see all restaurants, not just those which took out ads. But I'd be fine with those being featured at the top of the list.
Instead, what I get, is ads for hotels down the street when I'm already home. Or ads for a carpet store chain, which was closed that particular day (national holiday), which you also can't really miss if you set foot in the square.
Regarding monetization, they could probably figure a way to tell that if I click on the restaurant's pin, then follow directions there and stop at the address, I'm likely dining there.
Local pubs, even those part of a large chain, tend to give a nice feel of the region and the people who live there. And you can learn interesting details about the local history.
Google decision makers must know of its importance as a moat, a data collection pipe, a vehicle for other services and so on.
No offense, but trying to squeeze direct revenue out seems kinda laughable. Or maybe even a way to plausibly deny the indirect revenue importance.
https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=maps&ia=web&iaxm=maps
Just noticed it recently.
(I don't know to what extent the tech stack is shared between the two.)
I’m not sure who that drives revenue for, though.
I switched back to iPhone over this. I strongly prefer Here We Go to Apple Maps, and it is available on Android.
(Open platform, my ass…)
It's no accident.
That way it'd help a bit with the monopoly heat and maintaining it could be slightly cheaper. I don't know the legal stuff, but I'd rather have a company supporting a non-profit than burning money internally, so I hope the incentives follow that (yeah, probably not true thanks to lobby and having rich people run governments)
Assuming maps still loses a good chunk of money, how would it survive as a charity or non-profit? Where would the money come from? Who would donate to the charity?
This part is probably what keeps Maps valuable as an asset, and it's such a huge moat that letting it go would be irreversible. Building a similar product from scratch takes tremendous capital and local deals, we've seen how much of an effort it is for Apple to even have a viable product, coming up with a competitive offering would require double that.
Even if all counted for Maps was net 0 in the balance sheet, I feel there would be no Google CEO agreeing to let it go just for antitrust relief. They'd probably let Youtube become independant before that.
And there isn't a paid review staff, people who filter maybe, but Google doesn't review anything.
Mapping is a data collection/sanitization and content moderation problem. You need a lot of data, much of it user-submitted, and you have a lot of bad actors constantly trying to feed in bad data. I don't see where AI comes in here except maybe for route optimization, which is a tiny percentage of what a mapping app actually does. A mapping app is mostly just a huge database of incredibly useful info that needs to be true (and LLMs cannot help there, they just make shit up).
there's no need. Whereas individual movies do need a fake P&L, Google doesn't report Maps P&L at all. AFAIK.
Its assistant is also useless.
"OK Google, zoom in the map by a factor of 1.5"
"OK Google, stop hiding the businesses"
"OK Google, add a stop for the last Safeway before the turn onto route 120"
None of this stuff works.
Or “good lord just show me the street name please”
Don't change the context and try to outsmart me without giving me any indication of doing so. Don't attempt to outsmart me without giving any recourse if I don't like it. It only ever leads to information I want to see being hidden. You, Google Maps, do not know what I want better than I fucking well do.
Oh and not to mention that it sometimes tries to translate street names to my phone's language setting. Leave street names in their original language so I can match it up to the physical signs, goddamnit.
Letting you specify on Google Maps a kind of context that would swap between these at will would be an infinitely better experience, but unfortunately it doesn't grant promotions, unlike a blog post about the _brand new smart experience_
One of the changes brought about by the digital mapping revolution was to allow much less visually complex maps.
[1] https://blog.az.co.uk/z-map-company-supplies-london-emergenc...
Not surprised, we can come up with probably thousands of similar scenarios when some popular free tool ain't the smoothest to use for 'when I do this but want also that and while doing something else that isn't so well integrated into the flow something happens/doesn't happen but should' situation.
Maybe take a laptop and a mouse next time, 100x more efficient to use. Or use it in browser in tabs, so you can have 20 different locations/views and switch between them.
Using Maps while driving for anything other than A-B navigation is generally poor. It seems designed by people who are accustomed to every destination having plentiful dedicated parking. If you want to go to B, then find local parking, you need to invoke dark voodoo.
The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market. Google even contributed to this by buying Waze. So Maps only needs to be just good enough.
What does Android Auto and Apple Carplay have to do with it? Aren't both of them available for third party apps to use?
This is to me Google's most everyday impacting product, and what makes the difference between me being stranded/lost or making it in time. The stories of people ending in a lake for blindly following directions are cheeky, but decent maps are just that important, and Google Maps, how flawed it can be, is currently the best for so many areas.
Straight comparison to the other service I paid for for a while I gave up as it didn't seem worth it.
> Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much.
They costed a bunch and were a lot less useable in day to day life.
There was no device that would tell me the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, when the store I am going will close, and how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.
Now I get that with a mostly accurate map, end to end, automatically udpated as I start moving. And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.
The same thing goes for mountain maps, where I live the trail markers are relatively accurate and I can use it as a reference to check the official maps and on trail directions (and getting the other people's position is that much more valuable)
All in all it's a package that was never at hand before smarphones arised, and is currently only really working with Google Maps, even as we have OSM and Apple Maps at the distance.
> how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.
I actually think that keeping a worldwide map including cities street level details and natural paths up to date could cost a lot more that maintaining a browser or an OS.
There is a free Android (+ iOS) app doing a) and c), it's Transit App, at least in 18 countries and 300 cities [0]. Gives you schedules and (multimodal) trip planning including car, bus, transit, train, subway, cycling, walking, rideshare, bikeshare, scooter rental. It has both scheduled and (near-)realtime information, detours, service interruptions etc. Shows you all the options you're interested in, rolled up by start time and total time, and includes cost(/estimated cost for rideshare).
In text format, on a super small screen, free.
> And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.
Well ok but very few people use that much. Why do you need it so much? Socializing? Hiking? Playing Pokemon?
You're still left patchworking all these apps, switching from one another at every point and assembling everything in notes by yourself. It's super nice it can be done at all, but I'd also pay for an app that has it all in one place if it wasn't free.
To note, the c) part is not just public transport but anything from private bus network/taxi/private bike networks/just walk. While Maps deals with that decently, I'd agree it would be way too much too ask from a free transit app.
There's not much patchworking/assembling once you bookmark your preferred locations, research what times they open/close, select favorite transit modes, bookmark specific lines, research which exact stops. Don't mentally lock into Google Maps as your primary thing.
I said the c) part is already done by Transit App and generally better than Google Maps (shows rideshare time-and-cost estimates, bikeshare/scooter pickup locations etc.) Where 'taxi' has generally been replaced by rideshare and by 'private bike networks' you mean bikeshare. Not sure if by 'private bus network' you mean coaches, or employee shuttles, but those are sometimes not open to the public.
As mentioned, the amount of local detail depends on how much your municipality participates in open-date initatives; if it doesn't, ask them to. Transit App is adding new regions constantly.
Are you running a package delivery service, or taxi service? I don't understand this statement in other contexts.
You may be willing to pay €50 a month for it, but most people can't afford that and wouldn't pay it.
OSM lacks a lot of details that completely change how you'd move from point A to point B (I was missing overpass bridges and crossable paths in residential neighboorhoods), and point to point navigation is also not great. Then it completely lacks all the more commercial features Google has built on top of Maps (store details, position sharing, timeline etc.)
On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.
I wish I'd like OSM a lot more, but every time I ended up back to Maps for a reason or another.
Sadly I'm still not good with really basic compass and map positionning, and the GPS + average location info helped a ton in the past.
Interesting – personally I find Maps absolutely horrible for usage as an actual map for orienting myself (as opposed to just serving as a vague geographical background for displaying POIs or navigation information).
When you zoom out, it often doesn't really distinguish between forests and other open spaces (admittedly OSM's coverage in that regard varies regionally, though at least in Europe it seems quite comprehensive and definitively better than Google's).
Then, when you zoom in everything just turns into a featureless grey-on-grey with no distinction between built-up areas and everything else (only "parks" get shown, but e.g. in France that apparently even covers large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres, so in that case everything, including any towns happening to lie in that area, just gets shown with a green background, which is equally useless), and buildings are only shown when you start zooming in really closely.
On the rougher part of the maps, I often get back to satellite view and/or StreeView if available (even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time -_-;). It's a handy backup that I don't get on the open source map apps
And for unfathomable reasons Google Earth (the desktop version) can show historic aerial imagery, but no historic street view pictures, whereas Google Maps works just the other way round – you can view historic street view photographs there, but no historic aerial/satellite imagery. (And the browser version of Google Earth apparently can't do either.)
For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote. I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered. Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).
Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017. I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps. And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels. They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.
In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).
OSM was pretty good too in France but has different issues: they don't get the same access to up to date commerce data as exposed through local aggregators, and there's just not enough user data to have good heuristics on navigation times.
As you mention gas, for instance my gas cost are ridiculously low (less than 10 bucks a month) as the car is only for specific cases, and 99% of the time I'm not driving.
Same way I care a lot more about visiting new places than going to theaters, and I'd never end up with 5$ of paper maps (to dig my own grave, I also buy paper maps of the wilder areas I go and they sure cost way more than that...)
On the other had, getting lost somewhere I have no familiarity with, being stuck at a station that has an incident and not having any backup plans, looking for someone in a town for 30 min because they're describing places in a way that is too vague are situations that are highly stressful and can cost a lot more than 10 or 20 bucks. Have you ever missed the last train and thought how much it will cost you to do something about it ?
That's where I put the price of an app I actually use a ton, it could be one of the main reasons I have a smartphone and not a combination of a dumb modem and a tablet.
But for mapping lots of POIs this is a PITA and doesnt scale. What if the owner declines? This is non-copyrightable info anyway.
Shall one ask house owners if one can map their address or their house' outline?
If you just ask it without context, "today we'll close at 16:00" is a perfectly reasonable response.
Unfortunately there's nothing to aggregate current traffic information (traffic jams etc.) as far as I know.
The maps themselves support all sorts of routing options for walking/bikes/cars, at least: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#End_users:_routi...
They also have a Wiki page on public transport: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport
Sadly, they don't even attempt to have public transport schedules on the main maps, whereas Google has even added inter-city buses in some places, as well as having an integration with Bolt or other platforms I think.
That, in addition to the lack of business information, business hours, reviews and so on makes OSM a bit inadequate in comparison, which is unfortunate. There have been other maps that build on top of OSM data (which is great), but they're still pretty small in comparison.
It would be interesting to see how OSM would fare if it actually tried to compete with Google: 1st party Android/iOS map with some open dataset for business information, integration with some review platform, aggregated public transport maps with an underlying open dataset and stuffing their pockets as much as possible with money from Bolt/Uber/whatever to ensure longevity of the platform, by adding helpful suggestions for trip routing, as well as aggregating traffic data.
What Google is doing is to integrate public transport data (often in GTFS format). It is not mapped directly by Google, and unlikely that it would be doable in OSM (note that in many cities timetables change weekly, for example as result of construction).
There is some ongoing work to build similar things for OSM-using software, for example Organic Maps is at least trying: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues?q=is%3Aiss... (I bet that pull requests would be welcome, especially if discussed with people developing it)
They already know the photos have the objects they are interested in. You still think they are working on detecting motorcycles buses and signs?
The recaptcha part doesn't even depend on recognition, it's just a statistical comparison with what other humans clicked on given the same response + some javascript pointer and browser analysis.
Aren't they charging big money for the API?
Make one of those pins move because it's actually a car, and suddenly your cheeks are getting clapped with 6+-figure bills.
Pricing for the Maps Embed API
All Maps Embed API requests are available at no charge with unlimited usage.
Other usage limits
There are no short-term (queries per second) or long-term (queries per day) limits on the Maps Embed API.
Some sites we added it as an image to avoid this. Some sites got flagged as weren't allowed to do this and others have been ignored.
It’s an open-source system that is used worldwide, by a few thousand loosely-organized nonprofits.
When Google Maps suddenly required associated credit cards, it caused a great deal of trouble. It still causes problems.
That’s because most of these entities are not 501(c)(3) orgs, with bank accounts and debit/credit cards. In fact, the organization enforces deliberate poverty, amongst its chapters.
Someone needs to add their personal card to the Google Maps API. Since the maintenance people are constantly rotating, this is an issue.
Also, the API has a dashboard like a Space Shuttle cockpit. Most regular schlubs have a difficult time with it.
Google’s UI is a complete mystery to anyone outside google that doesn’t know the lingo. It seems to keep changing too.
I’d be terrified of a situation like AWS, where suddenly my card is charged thousands of dollars for some unexpected situation.
And, unlike AWS, I wouldn’t expect to be able to reach someone at Google to cancel the charge.
You mean a cult. This isn't a real issue for properly run 501c3, it's a tax registration for a reason.
Well, isn't that special?
Have a great day!
Also google grew laxy. Not tskes them a year to add a royal mail postbox
OSM is for nerds. Very hard to add even basic info. Google Maps it’s trivial.
Same as uploading photo to Google Maps is easier than adding it to WikiMedia Commons. Such is life.
(Ironically one of the biggest sources of photos is commons is Panoramio; before Google merged it with Google Maps, the photos there defaulted to Creative Commons.)
To add new features I have to use SCEE, which is more nerdy mainly because it involves using FDroid to install it. But I've no idea how to add, say a park bench to Google Maps.
On desktop, right click on the map and choose "Add a missing place." On mobile, long-press to drop a pin, then scroll down to "Add a missing place."
Does OSM require installing a parallel app store to add a park bench? Sounds like a UX-killer :/
You're right though, installing another app store is a non starter.
Google probably sees their data as a moat and likely aren't interested in two-way data sharing. (Given how many of their competitors are now involved directly or indirectly with OSM or Overture, they may be correct.) OSM probably can't legally scrape it without an agreement in place.
I don't think you can estimate overall worth of Maps to Google directly and easily. Its still #1 driving solution I use, its not perfect in dense traffic in cities but otherwise OK and for free, plus their estimates are pretty accurate.
Google does not need maps to have traffic data.
This is hugely useful for navigation since it means these bottlenecks can be avoided, some thing which is not possible unless this data is available.
Since the Google Maps is here, not only we have a completely congested highways but also all other roads that were free of tourists before are now blocked. Tourists that are traveling to the next country while their number has doubled as they dont stand in line from border to border but rather destroy any viable traffic for locals.
In some locations it has gone to the point where small villages with historically very narrow roads are literally blocked by **** (pardon my french), using google maps and see that there is a pass (while every road is the same, right) so the police needs to deter tourists to even head there. Wont even go into suffering of locals there.
Japan actually has some soft regulations in this space about routing and road visibility (e.g. residential roads are hidden when you’re on thoroughfares). But they’re just suggestions so only domestic companies follow them and Google, Apple, etc still provide their usual global algorithms.
Maybe there’s a good solution to this, but I don’t think it’s getting rid of mapping services and going back to security through obscurity.
Wanna se another interesting example (use google translate), here are statistics of our volunteer based and taxes paid (for everyone in need, even tourists, including helicopter transport) mountain rescue service: https://www.grzs.si/resevanje/statistika-nesrec/
Check number of accidents since 2006 (google maps came out 2005) and constant rise to 2023 (more than twice of the number of interventions). Freaking maps are showing the steepest mountain roads (Alps), to parts without phone signal. Google gets you just far enough to get into troubles.
Edit:
https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...
Somebody did it.
I believe it is a funnel of things: Slovenia became part of EU. GPS navigation in cars and smartphones became a thing. Google isn't even the only traffic data provider. Slovenia has RDS-TMC since 2009. So even a boring TomTom will show some form of congestion info.
But I agree with you, that navigation tools should not direct traffic away from the main roads (especial transit roads). Traffic planners should somehow be able to weight streets or routes.
What is your take on that?
The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name.
Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.
so an interface could be made to present it better: without being zoomed in so much, with filters and so on.
I know of https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/ which does this for public toilets.
I just found this which has an example for restaurants in one town: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/where-to-eat-in-middlebu...
Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.
I know median and mediocrity already share a common root, but I wish there were a clever portmanteau describing ML-optimizing for the median user leading to a mediocre experience. "Medianocre" just sounds like an eggcorn, so I presume 99% of readers would take it as a mistake instead of a neologism.
So, no Maps presence for you! (Except via direct search within Maps.) Just my anecdotal experience, but one of several similar on Maps that leave me thinking they "have that feel" to them.
I specifically had an area selected for a reason. I know there are plenty of restaurants there. I don't need it to tell me to look somewhere else.
So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.
Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.
In big cities, there is construction happening everywhere, POIs have closed down or changed location after the pandemic.
Street names are the only thing that stays the same.
It's maybe a bit of a shame that the raw tools (like OSM, QGIS, ArcGIS, even what is left of Google Earth) aren't easy to learn and equally accessible to everyone and the incentives of the big maps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc) is its own drive to a different lowest common denominator, but digital maps have such tools in the first place. (It was far more expensive to get custom printed maps. AAA triptychs are interesting thing to compare here.)
I would usually look at the map briefly, see "we need Farm Lane, should be 4th on the right" and then look at the street name signs. In a non-residential area I'll often do this on foot, but if I'm cycling I'm more likely to think "Right after the paint shop" or similar.
For those old enough, just think back to all the times your "navigator" wouldn't just tell you the street name or even "turn at the third intersection after this one " and instead waited until just moments before you reached it and said "Here" like a jack hole.
I need the street names. They're authoritative. Landmarks (or, worse, businesses used as landmarks) are things that are occasionally useful to me in the right circumstance, but they're too dynamic to really rely on.
If a map application doesn't make it easy to know the street names, then it's one that isn't useful to me.
Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?
Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.
This is in the US even. Working drinking fountains are not as ubiquitous as you might think in a lot of areas.
please avoid writing random bullshit numbers, just say "the majority". If you ever went to a touristic place outside a metropolis you would have seen plenty of people refilling their bottles at public fountains.
Seeing "plenty of people refilling their bottles at public fountains" says nothing compared to the vast majority that doesn't, and doesn't even carry bottles.
Also, regarding "please avoid writing random bullshit numbers", please avoid being rude.
In any case, you don't have to justify the rudeness, a simple "sorry" would have sufficed.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It’s almost like this isn’t a thing folks are actually looking for.
It does show a few of them, but it also shows an apartment complex miscategorized as one, and misses several within the city centre. They are shown with various names ("Toilet", "Public toilet", "Public toilet for men", "Public restroom") so I think this is crowdsourced, rather than anything Google has made an effort to map.
Although the interface of https://www.openstreetmap.org/ doesn't have a way to highlight them, other interfaces (phone apps etc) can, and OSM has much better coverage.
Everybody drinks water. It often isn't intuitively obvious where you can find water. Even in city parks, water fountains may not be where you expect but often are where you wouldn't. Google maps also sucks at finding bathrooms. Everybody pisses, even cyborgs.
Is it reasonable though?
Should Google Maps show me every single public bench too in case I need to sit down?
How about if I'm an avid cyclist, should they also show me every single secure railing I can lock my bike against?
I can do that only on google maps. Open Street Map does not provide that info. Now I am sure there are some local app I can use for each individual city that works fine. But with google maps I only need to have one app.
As user, that is what is valuable for me. I honestly dont care about how clutter is the interface.
I haven't found city specific transit apps any more helpful, but I don't have much experience with them. google maps sucks is terrible for the job though.
https://transitapp.com/region#all-regions
I've used it in 2 larger US cities so far, and can vouch for its functionality
Apple Maps is even worse, I don't think they even offer a way to update incorrect data -- not that I've been able to find. And it's super frustrating to use, because Apple Maps does not have a "Bicycle" layer that you can turn on and off to find pathways. They only appear if you plan a route. Totally idiotic.
I was literally on the same block as a restaurant and it wouldn't show in maps at all, though the other 3 restaurants on the block were, and the only way to get it to show up was to Google it then click on the maps link. As soon as I took focus off the restaurant it disappeared again.
I can only presume it's because they hadn't paid Google or were being punished for some reason. It lead to me looking for more examples and found many places, including some major ones in the city I'm visiting, were excluded for no apparent reason, even ones with 4.9 ratings, and the only correlation between them was that they either were inherently more "indy" than the rest and thus likely to avoid engaging in certain aspects of Google or were close to a more powerful competitor.
This was particularly shocking when Wendy's wasn't being shown at a strip mall but the Burger King was....
It makes Google look like the mob and everyone sees it. Everyone would understand if they would show businesses that pay at the top of the list but somehow instead they went this way, incomprehensible.
Could you tell us more how you came to this conclusion? Did someone high up ever literally tell you "we're not doing that because it could show up in discovery"? And if not, why have you concluded that?
But I think open street maps has a killer feature that Google doesn't have: the community.
De-anonymizing a Gaia ID is about as secure as it gets.
Disclosure: this is 6 year old info. YMMV.
I do not understand what resell means here. Who is google selling to first?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
That said:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
However it wasn’t clear how high quality the differential privacy algorithm was or if it was attackable. But the nefariousness of its use against groups and demographics was fairly apparent.
Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though
That was a couple years back. Who knows how much more invasive it’s gotten since.
Oh. And this data is considered to be “valuable debugging information”, so is not prevented by opting out of analytics.
This 100%. I would include Azure too.
I actively try not to use Windows every time I get a chance. I am so glad a company like Apple exists. I agree Apple might not be 100% right on privacy but they are pretty darn close that I a live with.
You'll just be a few versions behind, not sure what their release cadence is for this. But as far as I know this is a net positive to the Windows PC user and potentially eliminates needing to deal with GFE/Adrenalin as long as you are satisfied with the builds Microsoft is shipping you.
:-/
Then I remembered I game in linux, on steam.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/privacy-policy/
How I was wrong is was in the “valuable debugging information”. Because you can actually disable the sending of debug and crash statistics, but you cannot disable the collection of tracking everything you do except for password boxes!
The original source on the telemetry was a print magazine, CanardPC, but this is referenced quite a bit.
I was additionally wrong the GeForce Experience matters. This is currently untrue. After the original article was released of how much spying Nvidia does, the telemetry package was moved to the driver rather than GeForce experience.
Long story short: if you have an Nvidia video card and have not actively disabled nvtmmon then Nvidia is tracking every window you open, how long it’s open, which windows have focus and for how long, window locations titles etc, along with clicks (but not keyboard strokes) etc. *It is not only tracking games. It tracks everything. It does this with just the driver*. If you have GeForce experience, then that information is tied to your sensitive personal information. If you do not opt out, they sell that to advertisers. If you do opt out, the collection happens anyway, but they claim they’re not sending it to third parties.
You need to kill Nvidia telemetry services (one site has it listed as nmtvmon).
Another option would be to block traffic to Nvidia from leaving your network (pihole captures at least some Nvidia telemetry, not sure if it blocks all). I don’t have a list of urls or IPs to look out for.
C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\NvTelemetry\reports
For EU-based customers, how can this be GDPR-compliant?
Capturing window titles and how long they have focus over a weeks logging takes a couple bytes of text…
That seems like a lot for a piece of software that doesn't have to send anything whatsoever in order to do its job.
And in the monetization meetings it was never even discussed.
I've long since switched fields, but the irony is that the company I was working for survived and I heard maps for various business use is now much more expensive than our offer used to be and several large clients eventually switched back.
As a user, I loved maps when it came out. The pre-rendered tiled maps were clean and fast. The web UI was clean and responsive. Streetview was (and still is) absolutely mind boggling. Heck, I even applied to work for google maps at the time.
Nowdays maps is an absolute shitshow. I find it utterly unusable for almost any purpose except for streetview, which is the only reason I still know how it looks like.
Even just the ability of search to serve local seeking queries is a huge defensive moat, but the marginal revenue from having a model of the world is worth it.
From my perspective as an advertiser, mobile/local PPC has taken over, be it Local Service Ads or regular search ads listings that show up in maps.
SMART ads that use your GMB profile instead of your website go GANGBUSTERS for brick and mortar clients, who love them.
I wonder how long you have been gone, and if it's possible that they have taken over so much since you left that your statements here are no longer true.
- weather along route
Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.
- motorcycle friendly features
bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway
- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.
Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.
- local info, POI, etc
you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.
Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.
Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.
If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation. As it is, there are tons of patent lawsuits about Maps, and the damage claims always tried to get at Ads revenue, because Maps revenue was nil.
Caveat: I could be way out of date here. I've been retired a while now.
As for the UX: "enshittification" and big-company bureaucracy describe it pretty well.