I still use gmail and drive for work but otherwise I’m never logged into anything google at home. Today when I tried to expand on a restaurant’s hours it wouldn’t let me see them without logging in, although it still worked in incognito. This restaurant screenshot is just a random other example I tried, but for the one I was actually checking google had the correct hours while the official website hasn’t been updated in awhile and had the old ones (website said they’re still open for dinner but they’ve only been doing lunch for a year or so now)
Sure, go ahead irritating me when trying to use your service. Pushing me to log-in is THE way to drive me to other services. They have nothing to offer that’s worth/can justify logging in. nothing.
Except up-to-date opening hours, apparently
They probably don’t care if you use a different service if you don’t log in to use theirs. If you don’t log in they can’t easily monetize you by tracking your data and building a portfolio. Otherwise you use their resources at a cost and they don’t make money.
So threatening to leave for other services isn’t exactly a threat.
They still know who most users are even without a google login; they can monetize just fine.
For a long time google existed without an option to create an account
Except the government wanting this information didn’t exist. That’s the future, you ID will be tracked (it already is) and the government will know exactly what you say, where you go, and what you do. Throw it at an ‘AI’ for ‘normalcy’ and you have Minority Report in a much sadder way.
Everyone is under suspicion. Criticism of Israeli genocides detected! Apply terrorism charges. Right to a jury ignored or circumvented.
They don’t care, but in 10 to 20 years time they will hire consultants to figure out why their user base chose inferior products to their superior free service.
I work in 911 dispatch, we’re not really supposed to log into our personal accounts on the work computers, there have been a couple incidents (not specifically in the 911 center but other parts of our county government) where people have gotten viruses and such from opening links in their personal emails on county computers.
A lot of us in dispatch make pretty heavy use of Google maps. When a caller doesn’t know where they are and we’re not getting a good location from their cellphone, we can sometimes see a lot of details on Google maps that we can’t see on the maps on our dispatch software.
There have been a couple times a caller has described a house to me and a general area that it was in but not the exact address, but I was able to get that address from looking around on satellite view and street view.
Sometimes we can see businesses and other places on it that aren’t in our system or come up as something slightly different, like maybe everyone calls a school “the Smith School,” but the actual name of it, and how it’s listed in our system is the “John Q Smith Preparatory Academy” so if I search in our system for “Smith School” I won’t find it, but if I look on Google maps I might see that pop up.
There’s cases where like if the call is on the border between 2 towns and I need know which department to dispatch, I can look on maps for little landmarks that probably wouldn’t be listed in any map software so that I can ask something like “are you on the same side of the road as the house with a big statue on the front lawn, or are you across the street from that house?”
Point is, it’s a very valuable tool for my job in situations that can actually be life-and-death sometimes, and since I can’t log in to it at work, I worry about getting shut out from features I use or even out of the service entirely.
There’s OpenStreetMap. I’m not saying that it’s as suitable as Google Maps for you, but it’s a possible option.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
The’re not a commercial service, and the database backing it is freely distributable, so it won’t get cut off.
It doesn’t have Google Street View, though, and attempts at reimplementing such a thing have been pretty weak, so if you need that functionality, won’t help.
I have tried open street maps it didn’t even have my address correct. It was absolute trash. There are very few things that actually work and work well when you need them to work. I would never trust that service to work well. It relies far too much on individuals to fix everything wrong with it. I had to submit my correct address to it which took several weeks to correct. And that’s just one address that I looked at that’s a standard address no big deal shows correct on every other map out there but if I were trying to rely on that for life-saving services hell no.
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I don’t want to be the change to make it happen. I don’t want to be the beta tester of a product that’s supposed to be getting me around. What I want is I want a product that works I want something that functions when I need it to. When I go to an area that I am unfamiliar with and I’m using maps to try to find a house location a business whatever it is I don’t want to have to go in and beta test somebody else’s shit. That’s how Matt’s work.
Well we also have to take solar flares and GPS satellites into account. Can only do so much on a terrestrial level.
Next gen911 is going to fix this I work for county making the maps for Newworld or whatever dispatch system you’re using. Soon the whole county will be running on NG911. You can look it up but it basically replaces using the old lookup your system currently uses that comes from a master list Verizon and att own.
I really don’t see how NG911 is going to help when all my callers can tell me sometimes is something like that they’re near some trees, a big rock, and a brick wall. That’s not exactly something I can punch into my CAD. Or when it’s a 3rd party caller for their grandmother in a different town who needs help, but all they can give me is that it’s a big yellow house about 2 blocks from the elementary school with a statue of a cow on the front lawn.
There’s a lot of cool things that NG911 can help with, some of it is already implemented in my county, but they’re largely not the things I use Google maps for.
Because you’re not trained on it yet. New world sucks and so does the ally list from the phone companies. This is based on geospatial information and has been proven and is active in some counties working better and more efficiently. Everything you said is exactly what every dispatcher says when they get new tech you’re afraid to learn something new that’s better.
Those are the vibes you’re giving now. How about you actually try to explain how NG911 is gonna help with those scenarios I gave, because I don’t see any way the technologies involved that I’ve been told about are going to save me from having to manually look around on Google maps (or similar kind of service) to figure out where I need to enter a call.
Sure, I suppose they’ll be able to send me a picture or a video, instead of trying to describe it to me, but I’m still going to need to match that up to the real world somehow.
And sure, maybe our location data will be a bit better, but if they’re driving 5 minutes before pulling over to call, that location data won’t tell me what side of the road they were on when the accident actually happened.
I don’t have to because you obviously are one of the dispatchers who’s going to bitch and complain about every single point. And you’re also grossly underestimating how impactful this is. I’m a geospatial information scientist this is currently being established in the NE right now and it is helping better than old world systems. I’m not going to explain to you my job when there’s federal guidelines showing how this will be impactful. Go educate yourself I already got my degrees.
You’re a fucking corporation stooge who’s huffing your own farts.
There’s a lot of places where ng911 is going to be very helpful, this isn’t one of them and if you had any actual confidence that it would be helpful I this situation you’d be singing it’s fucking praises explaining how.
https://www.911.gov/issues/ng911/ Here you go. Now learn. It works better and I don’t have time to explain my whole fucking degree to a phone answerer when you just need to know it works better pick up the fucking phone.
Someone’s pissed off they have to do a new job and refuses to read documentation which is my proof. I don’t see why I’d have to re type it out for you to understand. Also I don’t work for a corporation I work for the government and this is live already and works better. If you want to know more about that you can read the fucking documentation you uneducated phone call taker. Go back to just picking up a fucking phone and leave the actual decision to people with degrees because we know what we’re doing because we fucking read. I’d be surprised if you could name me 10 books in person you read this year.
