Google rolled out the Lake America change on Saturday, while the official US government maps are still waiting.
Apple took slightly longer but as of this morning it also has the wrong name for Lake Ontario
I started deleting all my Google data yesterday
Where do I even begin with 20 years of emails on their servers 🤦♂️
An agent could help, but still tons of work
An agent like Gemini? 🤣
Use free Gemini to move off Gmail, double damage
It’s annoying that it’s not easier. I should be able to go to some European or Canadian competitor and at least know that I am not giving my data directly to US data brokers. Why aren’t there more options? You can’t tell me the US is the only one who has tech knowledge.
A lot of Americans would instantly jump to a Chinese competitor if they offered English support, fully knowing that all their data is going to the CCP to avoid the US surveillance landscape as it already is.
A lot of Americans would instantly jump to a Chinese competitor
I think this is pretty true. To expand:
I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I have to either run my own email/hosting/storage servers and surrounding infrastructure with the tech understanding required to do so*, or give my data to someone else. Not having an email address is not realistic when it’s the primary key for your bank, school, employer, etc.
*A decade or so ago, running an SMTP server was trivial. Now, it needs DMARC, DKIM, SPF, publicly trusted certificates, and maybe newer things I’m not familiar with in order to be able send email. These are not bad things, but they increase the requirements for self-hosting.
Right now, that ‘someone else’ is generally google or microsoft for most people, and those companies are so big they get to dictate how other tools I need to use work. They also freely sell my data or give it to the government - possibly without any sort of warrant via ‘data sharing agreements’.
US-based data brokers are actively hostile to me. A Chinese data broker is less likely to care, since I’m further from their profit model: I’m unlikely to buy a Chinese cereal or make-up brand or visit a restaurant halfway across the globe. This only matters as long as US and Chinese data brokers don’t share info, but I suspect there’s friction there. If there’s not, then there’s no reason to NOT switch.
If I have to give my data to someone, then I’d prefer to give it to someone who doesn’t directly impact or care about me the way google/microslop and the US government do.
It’s going to take me a long time to De-Google but you have the right idea.
The best time to start was years ago, but good for you for starting.
I started by just using another email as my main, to now I don’t need a single Alphabet product for anything I do.
That’s no surprise. The US government is really slow at getting things done
There’s a reason they removed “Don’t be Evil” from their corporate tenets. The almighty dollar comes first to them and they refuse to risk angering The Orange One.
Assuming they changed anything about their ideals and didn’t just think “hey does having this here reduce suspicion as intended or raise it when it begs the question of how a tech company could even be evil when they aren’t named ‘Microsoft’?”
No, no no no no. They’re not afraid of angering him.
This is the Nerd Reich and they had front seats to his inauguration. THEY are the evil.
Actually they just removed the “Don’t” part.
I refer to them as “Be More Evil, Inc.” now.
Don’t be less evil*
See “don’t be evil” is still there
Gross
Today is GrapheneOS day for me.
And if they ever try to take that away, I’ll get a fucking dumb flip phone and that’ll be that.
Open source is critical to our future.
Mine arrived today. Ironic.
Also ironic that I had to buy a pixel, but i needed a new phone so I wanted something that gos and other distros could run on
Oh don’t apologize for buying their subsidized data collection devices and then completely disabling the reason they subsidize the devices 😂
It’s a kick in the nuts to Google every time GrapheneOS is installed.
Single source hardware is a security liability. If Google does something to the hardware or firmware, the GrapheneOS project would be screwed. Google has already hobbled AOSP.
We cannot overly depend on Google’s or any one company’s good will.
I think GrapheneOS should think about gradually steering the project toward a basket of hardware companies. Shifting to Motorola is necessary in the near term, but the whole situation with Google’s behavior needs to be a wake up call.
They might be stuck with single source hardware from Motorola now, they announced recently there’s a good chance they can’t support the Pixel 11.
Already, the pixel 11 line is out for graphene
Boot licking fascist cowards.
What is utter horse shit is that they care about compatibility except for this.
The fact that it broke tons of Canadian websites and Google neither cares nor bothered to investigate shows their priority of sucking up to the Trump admin over everything else.
Change your default search engine, delete Google apps that you can (I need fucking the Google app for authentication…), create a non-gmail account and start migrating to it (yes this sucks, yes it takes a long time to finish, there’s lots of degoogling info on this out there now).
Aegis authenticator work just as good as Google authenticator and you can transfer all your keys.
I have to authenticate in the Google app sometimes though, not Google Authenticator, TOTP, or a passkey
Aegis is tits and it makes it easy to transfer TOTP codes back and forth between Aegis and KeePassXC.
I’d guess the calculus was something like:
Our users don’t want this thing
Fuck em, we’re a monopoly
the famously petty would-be dictator wants this thing
Do what he says, he could really hit our bottom line if he wants to
“Fuck em, we’re a Monopoly.”
I’d personally suggest Tuta over Proton simply because of the sketchiness of the Proton ownership and their conservative, business-first, citizens-second views.
Honestly, what about traffic aware navigation? In cities, that can make your commute take 1hour instead of 2 by knowing where the traffic jams are. And they are not super predictable on my commute.
Instead of recommending OpenStreetMap.org, I would suggest Cartes.app as the Google maps replacement (uses OSM data). It contains most features that Google Maps users are used to and will feel familiar to them. OpenStreetMap is more of the backend for mapping apps rather than a direct replacement for Google Maps.
Cartes for most features (satellite view, reviews, shareable links that work for anyone, etc.) and CoMaps for offline/driving directions.
So fwiw, the change was made official and updated in GNIS the day it changed on Google Maps, which uses GNIS behind the scenes. That same day, USGS said the name had taken effect in GNIS but that it was waiting for its maps to visually update.
I think this is a product of Google’s infrastructure being faster to automatically update with GNIS changes. The fact they didn’t step in to override it already shows that they’re willing to go along with this; I don’t think the fact it changed before USGS adds any significance to that bootlicking.
That is, I don’t assume Google manually intervened to make this happen faster.
Still, fuck Google Maps. I’m glad people are waking up to how this level of hegemony over maps gives corporations too much power.
I wish this was talked about more. So much hay being made about this on the assumption that Google maintains their own database of locations instead of pulling from sources like GNIS like they actually do.
Fuck Google, but we don’t need to make shit up to hate them. In fact, making shit up makes us seem crazy and hurts our position.
They could have easily made the effort to not change the name, don’t defend them. This isn’t some nothing change, they are very aware of what they are doing or not doing.
It reminds me of this conspiracy that was circulating a few months back that Apple Maps had “deleted” cities and places in Lebanon to culturally erase it for Israel’s invasion.
In reality (which you could see by e.g. looking at Reddit posts from a few years ago), Apple Maps’ coverage of Lebanon was absolute unusable dogshit the entire time. There were complaints about how it wasn’t even usable for basic navigation in Beirut. The city of Tyre (which was misspelled “Tyr”) was still there despite being one of the hardest-hit cities by Israel’s invasion.
Which was, to be fair, staggeringly incompetent, but it was provably true. Apple Maps’ coverage sucked so badly that, at a surface level, it looked like somebody took an erase tool to a competent map.
I think a lot of people don’t realize how automated corporate maps applications are. Which can be a weakness for crowd-sourced data like OpenStreetMap when there aren’t enough contributors, but that democratization is also a huge benefit that anyone can see and fix issues. The main parts of Google Maps that aren’t automated are points of interest, and those are kept up-to-date thanks to the network effect where e.g. business owners see value in maintaining their information or users feel like they’re helping out (read: doing free labor for a trillion-dollar corporation).
It’s just a bit silly considering how these companies have been leveraging publicly available information and how automated most of their systems actually are. It’s part of why customer service at many of them (not Apple so much I guess) is absolutely abysmal and they basically do their best to try to avoid to having a human being in the customer service loop at all. Automating almost all software and removing the human element has literally been the name of the game for 20 years at least.
Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example.
To be fair, the average person doesn’t know what sideloading is, while everyone will look at the map and see the changed name
You are obviously correct on that but we could also grab pitchforks about the term ‘sideloading’. Everyone knows what ‘installing’ is and ‘sideloading’ (in this context) is just a bullshit term to make it feel like something mysterious and/or dangerous. Installing software from play store is no different than installing from f-droid.
More likely, they have their own DB, or data lake, or whatever repository it might be, but it ingests the data from multiple sources.
I keep seeing this around. I’ve got friends at Google who have shared screenshots about the manual pull request (code change) that was made to update the name. They even have an internal shortlink pointing to that manual change since it’s so dumb
Why is a lake name stored in code versus a database?
Weird. The local (german) version still shows as it should. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: For now
They’re only changing it in the US.
Well…
Not quite. For the Gulf of mexico it shows “Gulf of America” as a subtitle.
Wonder if the guy that is super mad that people care about this is around.
You’re so dumb. The US resumed bombing Iran and bombed a wedding, and you’re concerned about this.
Wow, I really do have the power to summon you. It might be the least cool power in the world but I will cherish it, little-asslicker1, you have my word.
Boot licker.
I’m fucking done with Google Maps and their brown-nosing bullshit. Disabled it (can’t uninstall easily, otherwise I would). MapQuest from now on (or one of the other alternatives that has a spine).
Now to find a good alternative to Gmail (and go through that migration hassle). I’ve tried Proton Mail in the past. It was okay, but didn’t blow me away.
I like the Yelp integration with MapQuest. FlockHopper is good for finding routes that avoid flock cameras.
I use Organic Maps and CoMaps mainly. Sometime Kagi Maps and FlockHopper (not sure what I under the hood of that one though). I prefer OSM generally.
Shizuku, activated with USB debugging (if you can’t/won’t root), and Canta will let you fully remove Gmaps (and any other google shitware) pretty easily.
I even used it to remove that Android System SafetyCore app that apparently keeps reinstalling itself if you uninstall via normal methods and it hasn’t come back after roughly a year since removal so I’d say it’s a pretty effective and simple method to set up, just make sure to read the notes the Canta dev added for certain apps to make sure you aren’t going to break something you may still want.
Good info, thanks.
Shizuku is on the chopping block. One of the change requests being made to AOSP is blocking adb connections on the loopback interface, “for security”.
OSMaps
