Google rolled out the Lake America change on Saturday, while the official US government maps are still waiting.
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.
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.
Five eyes disagrees with this sentiment
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
They’ve been calling Palestine “Israel” since they came out, but none of you cared. Selective outrage over a distraction by the pedophile class.
Apple took slightly longer but as of this morning it also has the wrong name for Lake Ontario
Good. And I hope he signs an executive order to rename some oceans too.
These are marginally impactful in terms of real consequences and easily undone with the next administration, but extremely visible to and unpopular with voters. Every little bit helps.
Yes, I agree. People who otherwise don’t pay a lot of attention generally think it’s really stupid, so it brings more attention to stupid things. It may be a very small thing that can be changed easily, but you’re so right. It brings a lot of attention that is not so positive for Trump and the crew.
Everyone spam them with map corrections!
Im doing my part .gif
That’s no surprise. The US government is really slow at getting things done
Boot licker.
Don’t be evilBe a cuckI know it won’t matter, but you can report something missing in the map and call it out.
Just tried the Mapquest app and it worked perfectly. As far as I can tell it doesn’t have satellite view, but I usually just dick around with that when I’m bored sitting at an actual computer, not when I actually need directions.
OSMapsOpenStreetMapNot for users outside the US, though.
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.
You feel good about yourself?
I want you to know, sincerely, that you are exactly why nothing will get better.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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?
