Mildly Infuriating

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.

You should see what they did with reCaptcha. Today for the first time I got the popup telling me to scan a QR code with my phone in order to continue. Well, fuck that.

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.

Everyone has their breaking points. The enshittification will continue until morale improves (by leaving Google).

The only Google properties I still use are YouTube and Scholar (occasionally).

I really just need to get off google entirely but I'm also very unmotivated/lazy/ADHD, and the common alternative FOSS maps just don't provide the same level of detail, especially in non-US or English speaking countries.

This trend is gaining traction. It stated with twitter, then other platforms followed, Reddit does it now too.

You can't monetize unlogged in traffic I guess.

They will make everything mandatory log in for 100% named tracking soon, unless regulations call for otherwise.

These tech companies are the ones demanding ID laws to use the internet on computers. Microsoft OS already serves unique identifiers that can track down computers, and they want to close the loop.

They already have an overwhelming amount of information about us anyway, but the more perfect the dataset the more power, control and advertising revenue it affords.

These billionaire owned companies all want to enslave us all with absolute control. Call me paranoid or dismiss what I’m saying if you would like, but unless we can fix our politics in all of our respective areas to free them from the yoke of big money it will only get worse.

https://www.comaps.app/

Soon; "Or click here and we will stop bugging you for this and use you ip, mouse movement behaviors, scroll lag time and recent cookie history to identify you without having to even log in!"

I'm jumping ship for comaps, it's FOSS, no data collection, uses Wikipedia for location descriptions, has an offline mode, and doesn't do weird shit like divert you from a highway to drive on gravel roads to circumvent a perfectly fine 5 mile stretch of highway

I use google maps in the browser on my phone without an account logged in. Every single time I open it, it gives me a pop up message begging me to use their app with two buttons at the bottom that are blatantly dark patterned and misleading to get you to accidentally click on their app store link.

OpenStreetMap ftw

Google did that to me yesterday when I tried to check reviews for a place. I did not check the Google reviews. Sucks my nuts google

Which is why I'm building my own self hosted map application

Fuck Google with an umbrella

It's sad to see how time and time again companies build up a big user base by being the best service out there, and then just assume that they'll be the market leaders forever and ever no matter how much they enshittify.

The amount of vendor lock-in with something like Google Maps is very close to zero.

yeah it was awhile back where my tablet would lose the directions thing with google maps once I was off wifie that drove me to organic maps.

udm14.com does not appear to be affected.