Google rolled out the Lake America change on Saturday, while the official US government maps are still waiting.
I know it won’t matter, but you can report something missing in the map and call it out.
That’s no surprise. The US government is really slow at getting things done
I started deleting all my Google data yesterday
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.
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.
i wonder how many canadians that were sitting on the fence about de-googling are no longer sitting on that fence…
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start by changing your default search, google ai overviews made it useless anyways. check out duck duck go or startpage
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stop using google spyware browser (chrome and all chrome builds) and switch to firefox (or preferably a privacy focused fork, i.e. waterfox, librewolf
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learn linux… quit windows
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self-host your own server and run your own localized, private apps, immich instead of google photos, vaultwarden instead of password manager, jellyfin instead of netflix, etc.
5.???
- profit!!!
Duckduckgo is backed by microsoft/bing which they have a contract with.
Startpage is the duckduck alternative that uses google, its unknown wether they have a contract.
These places are still better then google/bing themselves but people often wrongfully assume that they provide a privacy oriented service.
If you really want to go anticorporate you can host your own searxng, which still by default uses results from google and bing but can be configured to use any on your preference and its code open to verify that they do not give exclusive permission to certain paying corporations.
Using searxng it can happen that some google result could not be retrieved because of api limits… one has to wonder why Startpage does not have those limits.
But even just getting off the main Google search page is huge. So much of this is about adopting a posture of flexibility and taking responsibility for your data to some extent, and which companies you can and can’t tolerate. So just rejecting the convenience of using Google as search is great.
Because now you don’t feel so totally helpless—you’ve got an example of exercising your agency over your “digital life” and you can keep doing it as needed/desired with greater ease.
Main thing to realise is you’re not going to find a drop-in replacement for Google that is some giant centralised search and auth platform strangely super-motivated to reduce friction between you accessing products online.
qwant together with ecosia are working on establishing a fully independent search index but at this point it is really in its early days, with ficus on France and Germany.
The problem is, “who wants to be a computer admin?” To which Google says, “I’ll be yours (and I’ll narc on you too for ads and IC).”
Yeahhhhh… I was actually just thinking about this the other day, and kinda realized that a lot of people in my dad’s generation cosplayed as lawn maintenance landscapers in their spare time, I larp sysadmin
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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. These companies do enough real evil shit, we don’t need to piss our time away on this non-issue.
Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example. I’ve seen way more mainstream news about this one item on a fucking map than I have about the loss of sideloading and the loss of actual ownership of the devices we purchase.
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.
I think this gets mentioned every single time one of these stupid name changes comes up.
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
deleted by creator
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.
I mean the original Google ranking algorithm itself was partially made by checking the publicly available information (via web scraping) of how many times a site had been linked to from other sites. And to keep it accurate, they had to keep scraping constantly to keep updating the publicly available data for their own purposes. All of which was automated as well, by the way.
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?
I think they must mean an override to the name in the db?
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.
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
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’?”
Don’t be evil to our shareholders or President Grump.
Shared from Toronto, unsure of source, still funny.
cute meme, but f*ck AI slop
Trump’s dick cheese must be tasting pretty good considering how many people are going for it
Nah, it will be just as awful as you imagine but those people love to keep punishing themselves by forcing it down their throat
Boot licking fascist cowards.
Gross
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.”
- https://www.openstreetmap.org/: Google Maps replacement, more detailed
- https://www.comaps.app/: Replacement for the mobile app, lets you pre-download them so you don’t need to have mobile connections. Perfect for when you’re out in the Stix.
And while we’re at it.
- https://duckduckgo.com/: Google replacement, respects your privacy, AI features turn-off-able and completely optional.
- https://proton.me/: gSuite replacement, Email, Cloud Storage, Docs, Calendar, Video Calls, Authenicator. Actually worth paying for.
I’d personally suggest Tuta over Proton simply because of the sketchiness of the Proton ownership and their conservative, business-first, citizens-second views.
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.
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.
Already, the pixel 11 line is out for graphene
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.
i just got a pixel 10 pro… kinda wish i had got a samsung instead now
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.
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.
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”.
Good info, thanks.
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.
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.
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.
