Why people don't talk about Google Maps' privacy issues

Title is editorialized because the original is, frankly, clickbait garbage

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Normal people: Gladly give google maps access to location data at all times and never think about it
Me: Instinctively worry that on the rare occasions I do use google maps it's somehow identifying me and keeping track of all the locations I look at, so I sometimes look at random places I'm not really interested in just to throw off the algorithms.
But most of the time I prefer osmand.
- Me: can't install Google Maps because my phone doesn't have gapps. Awesome.
  
  Oh yeah, I tend to forget that there's an app and it's not just a website.
  
  You have been free for a while then i suppose.
  
  Oh, yeah, I do use the website sometimes to convert an address to GPS coordinates and load that into OSMAnd
- Osmand is really cool and it's really capable but I understand that it isn't for people who don't want to tinker a bit to make things work just right for them.
  For that Organic Maps is what I recommend.
  
  I daily drive osmand. Where do you need tinkering there?
  
  The UI is definitely confusing for OSMand
  
  I usually use OsmAND for my motorbike tours where I love the adaptable UI. But importing round trips is a big hit or miss, where most of the time it just skips all intermediary stops
  And for daily "driving" (hehe) I do miss some traffic info :-(
  
  Idk how the new user experience is now but back when I first downloaded it I wanted a hybrid of sat imagery when cell signal allowed, with an overlay of offline OSM data. This was for two reasons, hiking and to see if the mapping in that hike area needed any major land use edits.
  Anyway I had to fiddle with the menus and settings for a while to get the overlays where I wanted it to be. Don't get me wrong I was able to figure it out but for users who want to install and go it can be understandably frustrating
- Or have your phone location turned on and be super boring back and forth. When you deviate use a burner.
- You: thinking they weren't already tracking you by a zillion other means including wifi/bt and cellular triangulation
  Me: google-free wifi-only phone with all radios/mic/camera physically disconnected unless I need something specific
- Normal people: Gladly give google maps access to location data at all times and never think about it
  Yet also same normal people get utterly genuinely shock when they see a map of their past locations for the last 3 months.
  
  Do they though?
- Use fossdroid

119 comments