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Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field

Google maps has marked my parents in laws drive way as a road. The drive way is quite long as they are on a farm. Due to a right of way for an owner of a field who owns an enclave within their land they can’t put a gate up. It’s quite unmistakable you are going into someone’s house though. This has led to countless individuals showing up and driving through their land past their home. Lots of people stop and ask for directions. However a few times it’s gone beyond a mere nuance. They’ve had people show up at their door in the middle of the night and some won’t take no for an answer when they tell them google maps has gone wrong. On two occasions this has led to extremely aggressive behavior. My in laws are quite old and as the family tech guy I got asked to step in. I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears. It’s now Google’s fault how people behave but maps have consequences on peoples lives.

loco5niner 6y ago
Goes the other way too. We were looking at some property and were aggressively confronted after going down someone's apparent driveway in the country just like this. It was not at all clear it was a personal driveway and the person was quite rude.
nicoburns 6y ago
It seems like the obvious solution to this would be a large sign at the entrance to the driveway.
- mulmen 6y ago
  There is no way the general public trusts a sign over Google.
  - jclulow 6y ago
    Even if they trusted the sign, I have observed that people (myself included) often don't even _see_ all the signs when we're being directed by the GPS. I'd love to see a study on what changes about your perception when using a navigation system.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      The same happens when we follow the directions of a passenger navigating for us. My bet: part of us is concentrating on hearing instead of seeing. We've also delegated navigation to somebody else and that impairs our navigation abilities until we're back doing it ourselves.
    - hyperdimension 6y ago
      "Regulatory and warning signs should be used conservatively because these signs, if used to excess, tend to lose their effectiveness." -- Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, 2009 edition, section 2A.04, paragraph 01 Replace 'signs' with anything--no one's patience/attention will hold up in the face of a constant barrage of information.
- neffy 6y ago
  It seems like the obvious solution to this would be for Google to provide a sensible way to accept corrections to their maps. We had to get a change made to Google maps to prevent people getting killed here, and it took national news, and personal contacts within the organisation. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
  - s0rce 6y ago
    In the US its pretty easy to submit corrections. I've submitted a few corrections on US public lands but now I usually don't bother and just update open street map instead.
    - cmroanirgo 6y ago
      I have submitted many glaring fixes, often multiple times for when it continues to be a problem, over months... and almost never is it fixed.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      I once submitted a correction for the exact location of a public park. The correction looked like it was applied, but when I looked later it had been reverted.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        The data pipelines for maps can be very long - certain changes might take 6 months or more to be applied, because the computation required to rebuild certain things is massive, and it isn't worth doing simply because some street edge moved by a few centimeters.
        mark-r 6y ago
        This wasn't a few centimeters - I had trouble finding the park because Google had it a couple of blocks away from its actual location.
    - jackvalentine 6y ago
- lostlogin 6y ago
  I’d be gobsmacked if a sign helped. Signs are like v1.0 for pop-ups, pretty much no one reads them. It’s always amusing seeing the way signs in communal facilities change over time, nice, to passive aggressive to raw anger.
- cmroanirgo 6y ago
  It happens all over in my country, Australia. My neighbor has signs, I've petitioned Maps several times that it's private property and nope: ignored. A friend of mine just bought a property in regional Australia, and Maps wants to send anyone going to going to his place via forestry roads and then across two private properties to get there, despite having main road access. Once in another part of Oz, we were sent up a cliff face, in the middle of the night, and it took an hour and a half to correct it's mistake. Every time I try and "fix" maps by reporting it, and very very very rarely is it fixed Another property has two "crown roads" on it, but to all purposes, they're very dangerous 4wd trails, again thru private property. The owner has signs, but the belligerent and unaware swear by the Goog, insisting it's correct. I prefer paper maps over the Google rubbish.
  - KMag 6y ago
    Paper maps also never run out of batteries or refuse to work as expected because they can't reach a cell tower. I'm so glad my parents took me camping on the US-Canadian border as a kid and forced me to navigate for the family (with them double-checking). Teach your kids to navigate by map. When you really need it, you really need it. Hiking in Hong Kong, Google maps disagreed with the route I was attempting to take on Sir Cecil's Ride back around the back side of the rock quarry. Google maps took us across the front face of the quarry, past the police shooting range / Explosive Ordinance Disposal Depot, and up a sheer rock face next to the quarry with the assistance of a cobbled-together rope some kind soul left for others, then through a bamboo thicket that cut my wife's legs up. My wife no longer insists on following Google maps if it disagrees with the hiking route I'm planning.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  People routinely ignore these - and if caught, they claim "but I'm following Maps, it's never wrong"... yeah, you're a fucking semi driver now stuck on a forest path (e.g. this one: https://rp-online.de/nrw/panorama/hagen-40-tonner-lkw-im-wald-festgefahren-im-falschen-hagen_aid-9677595 https://rp-online.de/nrw/panorama/hagen-40-tonner-lkw-im-wal...).
- slickrick216 6y ago
  Yeah we did that recently. Should have mentioned it. Some people sadly don’t read signs though.
rolph 6y ago
you cant gate it but you should be able to ~park~ vehicles in your own driveway. there is a situation similar to this near me and it has caused damages and near fatalities as vehicles moving 50 mph roar down the driveway, round the bend and suddenly there are people, a well head a house and a seafright container up front and center.
drdavid 6y ago
Where I live, they'll send you down logging roads and old, disused roads fit only for 4WD trucks. It's not just Google. Other GPS maps will send you to my house on a road that hasn't really been passable for 30 or 40 years - if you make the mistake of not telling it to avoid dirt roads. But, if you tell it to stick to paved roads, it'll have you park about 2 km away. I have no idea how to fix this, except to suggest that they update the maps that the GPS relies on. It's such a remote area that it's not a priority for them. Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.
- Triv888 6y ago
  Google tracks all Android phones all the time, they should be able to see that no one uses that road, they just don't care.
  - ckdarby 6y ago
    Plenty of people with their Android phones will still go over that section with their snowmobiles, four-wheelers, bike, etc. How does Google tell the difference between someone on an electric bike vs a car going on a dirt road doing 20-30km/h to not have rocks flying everywhere?
    - sorisos 6y ago
      I believe you can get a lot of information from accelerometer data. Especially when compared with other data for the same road. Is it even used in this way?
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      I ran into this problem a lot when I was living in downtown SF of all places. One should never drive in front of AT&T/Oracle stadium when an event is ending, as the traffic is insane and part of the road is closed to allow for the mass of pedestrians. But Maps interprets pedestrian traffic as car traffic and shows that section of the road as green and moving faster than the sections with actual cars, and tries to direct you down it.
rz2k 6y ago
Have you tried looking at Open Street Maps? If your county's GIS and OSM both exclude their driveway, it might be easier to get Google to update. In my area, it sees like some of the driveways have turned into roads because of overly helpful contributors.
- Twaway45609 6y ago
  We live in a street named 'ms x of y' and someone renamed our street to y. As there was anither street called 'z x', deliveries were always going to the wrong street, or marked as invalid address. Fixing it in OSM fixed it slowly in all drivers navigation systems and after a year no deliveries were lost anymore
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Google won't look in OSM... All kinds of legal hurdles there... They can look in some government maps, depending on the licenses.
  - mbirth 6y ago
    I wouldn't say so. According to [1] they're a big supporter of OSM. [1]: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/615/can-google-maps-take-osm-data-and-use-it-in-their-own-maps https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/615/can-google-maps...
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      > Google, and other companies are welcome to use OpenStreetMap Data as long as they meet their obligations in the OpenStreetMap License. But they do not make wide use of OSM data, because one of the terms of the license is attribution, of which there is none on any Google product I have seen. I would guess they are big supporters of OSM as a hiring thing - by supporting an opensource project, you will get young engineers interested in mapping, some of which will then go work on Google Maps. It also helps any antitrust cases if Google isn't the only game in town, which was the case for many years.
- 6y ago
vulcan01 6y ago
> I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears. Cue Googler who will find this comment and magically fix this problem. The HN effect.
zalebz 6y ago
I think the answer is to put up a gate with keypad and just provide the code to the landowner that has right of way. expensive but 100% effective.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Talanes 6y ago
  Even a gate with just a rope latch would give most people pause.
  - mark-r 6y ago
    You'd need to get cooperation from the other folks using the road that they'd replace the rope after driving through.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      You'd need more cooperation to put a pin-code activated electronic gate up.
      - mark-r 6y ago
        But at least the gate would automatically close once they went through.
        Talanes 6y ago
        Just need a gate that exerts tension when it's opened, so it'll drift back to closed if someone forgets. I've crossed a lot of back-country gates, never seen a wild breakdown of the system.
        mark-r 6y ago
        Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. You can't do that with a rope.
diogenescynic 6y ago
And Google intentionally make it difficult to get ahold of any actual human. I really hope they get broken up, they are clearly a monopoly and abuse their power.
colejohnson66 6y ago
IANAL, but would it be possible to sue Google (in small claims) over the nuisance?
- meowster 6y ago
  What are the monetary damages, and how can you prove Google caused the damage?
  - paulmd 6y ago
    The monetary damages would be determined based on the level of nuisance caused, which could be objectively measured by the data google keeps on trip routing that has utilized that particular road. Love the whole "nothing can be measured, who can say!?" attitude on Google of all fucking things. They log everything and delete nothing. Yes, they absolutely do know how many people they've routed down that person's driveway, and a subpoena/discovery would clear it right up.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    Seeking damages seems silly, but I’m sure that’s something you could get a court to order Google to change. Technically you could make the argument that the map directions are incitement/solicitation to commit a crime. But I doubt you’d get a prosecutor to pick up that case.
  - travisoneill1 6y ago
    Just make it up. This will never go to trial. Google's lawyers will see that the plaintiff is correct and make the change in maps.
diogenescynic 6y ago
Submit a complaint to a state regulator. Someone at Google will wake up and sort it out once they get an email from their regulator to Google’s compliance team. If you can get a lawyer to submit the complain it’ll be even more effective.
- gruez 6y ago
  What regulator would have jurisdiction here? Are maps even regulated?
  - paulmd 6y ago
    A very flippant "HN techbro libertarian" response. Pretty much everything that is not constitutionally protected as a right can be regulated, why would you possibly think that it couldn't? Yes, you absolutely could lobby for someone to write a law requiring Google to respond to nuisance requests from their navigation services. That is basically what DMCA does, after all. Hypothetical example law: OK, you have a good-faith presumption up until someone emails you a copy of a deed and proves it's their driveway, then you legally need to correct it within X days or penalties start to rack up.
    - fuzxi 6y ago
      Your response is unnecessarily aggressive. His questions are innocent.
      - flemhans 6y ago
        I agree. And it resorts to name-calling. What's a techbro, anyway.
    - abeppu 6y ago
      You've said that stuff which isn't constitutionally protected _can_ be regulated, but the question posed was _are_ maps regulated. Are they? What legal obligation to accuracy or comprehensiveness are map-makers bound by? And are maps constitutionally protected? If political donations are speech then maps certainly seem like speech.
Thorrez 6y ago
>I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears. You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me. Full disclosure I work at Google, not on Maps, and I always did the suggest a change with my personal account.
- SECProto 6y ago
  > You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me. I've had a road that is mis-named near me. I've used the "suggest a change" feature multiple times, but have never gotten a response other than the automated "it'll be reviewed". Road is still mis-named. Other changes i've suggested have gone through in hours.
  - visarga 6y ago
    Probably have to submit it to OSM and wait until Google loads their data into GMaps. /s
    - dan-robertson 6y ago
      I think google don’t use OSM data.
      - emteycz 6y ago
        Well and yet this is what I did and it worked, after around a year of waiting.
        Freak_NL 6y ago
        It is possible that whoever Google has hired for the local edits uses OSM as a reference in response to feedback received via Google Maps. Not explicitly of course, because this is strictly forbidden, both ways, due to license incompatibility. For OpenStreetMap this is a very important point, because well-meaning novice mappers copying streets or points-of-interest directly from a proprietary map put the project at risk of litigation. Google will likely have such a strong rule in their own internal documentation as well. OSM strongly discourages the mapping of trap streets — fake streets that only exist on your map for unscrupulous competition to copy so you know that they did so — but it's possible that some mappers do put these on the map. I don't think one of the big proprietary maps has ever been caught copying one of these though.
hypervisorxxx 6y ago
I love how this article talks about the neglect of the process from Google and probably says something significant about russia's relationship with google in general and google maps at the cost of two of their own citizens needlessly dying by freezing to death and in the top rated comments is bicker about whether an old couple should be the one to pay for a gate to stop accidental trespassing. I get the problems are both of the same origin, but the discussion has a much better chance of making progress and getting Google's attention which is hard to do when people's lives are at stake. Or when they have been lost directly due to their own oversights.
noja 6y ago
If you want a solution for this today: put up a sign, with a google maps logo on it saying "wrong way" in big letters, below it explain that google have wrongly marked this trail as a road.
- fock 6y ago
  they'll have a hard time, keeping up with the changing logo!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
FerretFred 6y ago
> I’ve done the whole google [*] support thing but no response and deaf ears Seems to be the Google way of doing things: they can't do everything with algorithms!
yarcob 6y ago
Apparently there are people who try to mark public roads as "private" on Open Street Maps to discourage Waze from sending traffic. But Waze seems to love sending people via quiet roads, so maybe that's why Google is ignoring you. They think your inlaws driveway is a nice shortcut and don't care who owns it.
sfifs 6y ago
Have you explored sending a legal notice through a lawyer?
petre 6y ago
Errect a signpost with a discouraging message.

loco5niner 6y ago

Goes the other way too. We were looking at some property and were aggressively confronted after going down someone's apparent driveway in the country just like this. It was not at all clear it was a personal driveway and the person was quite rude.

nicoburns 6y ago

It seems like the obvious solution to this would be a large sign at the entrance to the driveway.

mulmen 6y ago
There is no way the general public trusts a sign over Google.
- jclulow 6y ago
  Even if they trusted the sign, I have observed that people (myself included) often don't even _see_ all the signs when we're being directed by the GPS. I'd love to see a study on what changes about your perception when using a navigation system.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    The same happens when we follow the directions of a passenger navigating for us. My bet: part of us is concentrating on hearing instead of seeing. We've also delegated navigation to somebody else and that impairs our navigation abilities until we're back doing it ourselves.
  - hyperdimension 6y ago
    "Regulatory and warning signs should be used conservatively because these signs, if used to excess, tend to lose their effectiveness." -- Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, 2009 edition, section 2A.04, paragraph 01 Replace 'signs' with anything--no one's patience/attention will hold up in the face of a constant barrage of information.
neffy 6y ago
It seems like the obvious solution to this would be for Google to provide a sensible way to accept corrections to their maps. We had to get a change made to Google maps to prevent people getting killed here, and it took national news, and personal contacts within the organisation. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
- s0rce 6y ago
  In the US its pretty easy to submit corrections. I've submitted a few corrections on US public lands but now I usually don't bother and just update open street map instead.
  - cmroanirgo 6y ago
    I have submitted many glaring fixes, often multiple times for when it continues to be a problem, over months... and almost never is it fixed.
  - mark-r 6y ago
    I once submitted a correction for the exact location of a public park. The correction looked like it was applied, but when I looked later it had been reverted.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      The data pipelines for maps can be very long - certain changes might take 6 months or more to be applied, because the computation required to rebuild certain things is massive, and it isn't worth doing simply because some street edge moved by a few centimeters.
      - mark-r 6y ago
        This wasn't a few centimeters - I had trouble finding the park because Google had it a couple of blocks away from its actual location.
  - jackvalentine 6y ago
lostlogin 6y ago
I’d be gobsmacked if a sign helped. Signs are like v1.0 for pop-ups, pretty much no one reads them. It’s always amusing seeing the way signs in communal facilities change over time, nice, to passive aggressive to raw anger.
cmroanirgo 6y ago
It happens all over in my country, Australia. My neighbor has signs, I've petitioned Maps several times that it's private property and nope: ignored. A friend of mine just bought a property in regional Australia, and Maps wants to send anyone going to going to his place via forestry roads and then across two private properties to get there, despite having main road access. Once in another part of Oz, we were sent up a cliff face, in the middle of the night, and it took an hour and a half to correct it's mistake. Every time I try and "fix" maps by reporting it, and very very very rarely is it fixed Another property has two "crown roads" on it, but to all purposes, they're very dangerous 4wd trails, again thru private property. The owner has signs, but the belligerent and unaware swear by the Goog, insisting it's correct. I prefer paper maps over the Google rubbish.
- KMag 6y ago
  Paper maps also never run out of batteries or refuse to work as expected because they can't reach a cell tower. I'm so glad my parents took me camping on the US-Canadian border as a kid and forced me to navigate for the family (with them double-checking). Teach your kids to navigate by map. When you really need it, you really need it. Hiking in Hong Kong, Google maps disagreed with the route I was attempting to take on Sir Cecil's Ride back around the back side of the rock quarry. Google maps took us across the front face of the quarry, past the police shooting range / Explosive Ordinance Disposal Depot, and up a sheer rock face next to the quarry with the assistance of a cobbled-together rope some kind soul left for others, then through a bamboo thicket that cut my wife's legs up. My wife no longer insists on following Google maps if it disagrees with the hiking route I'm planning.
mschuster91 6y ago
People routinely ignore these - and if caught, they claim "but I'm following Maps, it's never wrong"... yeah, you're a fucking semi driver now stuck on a forest path (e.g. this one: https://rp-online.de/nrw/panorama/hagen-40-tonner-lkw-im-wald-festgefahren-im-falschen-hagen_aid-9677595 https://rp-online.de/nrw/panorama/hagen-40-tonner-lkw-im-wal...).
slickrick216 6y ago
Yeah we did that recently. Should have mentioned it. Some people sadly don’t read signs though.

rolph 6y ago

you cant gate it but you should be able to ~park~ vehicles in your own driveway. there is a situation similar to this near me and it has caused damages and near fatalities as vehicles moving 50 mph roar down the driveway, round the bend and suddenly there are people, a well head a house and a seafright container up front and center.

drdavid 6y ago

Where I live, they'll send you down logging roads and old, disused roads fit only for 4WD trucks. It's not just Google. Other GPS maps will send you to my house on a road that hasn't really been passable for 30 or 40 years - if you make the mistake of not telling it to avoid dirt roads. But, if you tell it to stick to paved roads, it'll have you park about 2 km away. I have no idea how to fix this, except to suggest that they update the maps that the GPS relies on. It's such a remote area that it's not a priority for them. Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.

Triv888 6y ago
Google tracks all Android phones all the time, they should be able to see that no one uses that road, they just don't care.
- ckdarby 6y ago
  Plenty of people with their Android phones will still go over that section with their snowmobiles, four-wheelers, bike, etc. How does Google tell the difference between someone on an electric bike vs a car going on a dirt road doing 20-30km/h to not have rocks flying everywhere?
  - sorisos 6y ago
    I believe you can get a lot of information from accelerometer data. Especially when compared with other data for the same road. Is it even used in this way?
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I ran into this problem a lot when I was living in downtown SF of all places. One should never drive in front of AT&T/Oracle stadium when an event is ending, as the traffic is insane and part of the road is closed to allow for the mass of pedestrians. But Maps interprets pedestrian traffic as car traffic and shows that section of the road as green and moving faster than the sections with actual cars, and tries to direct you down it.

rz2k 6y ago

Have you tried looking at Open Street Maps? If your county's GIS and OSM both exclude their driveway, it might be easier to get Google to update. In my area, it sees like some of the driveways have turned into roads because of overly helpful contributors.

Twaway45609 6y ago
We live in a street named 'ms x of y' and someone renamed our street to y. As there was anither street called 'z x', deliveries were always going to the wrong street, or marked as invalid address. Fixing it in OSM fixed it slowly in all drivers navigation systems and after a year no deliveries were lost anymore
londons_explore 6y ago
Google won't look in OSM... All kinds of legal hurdles there... They can look in some government maps, depending on the licenses.
- mbirth 6y ago
  I wouldn't say so. According to [1] they're a big supporter of OSM. [1]: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/615/can-google-maps-take-osm-data-and-use-it-in-their-own-maps https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/615/can-google-maps...
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    > Google, and other companies are welcome to use OpenStreetMap Data as long as they meet their obligations in the OpenStreetMap License. But they do not make wide use of OSM data, because one of the terms of the license is attribution, of which there is none on any Google product I have seen. I would guess they are big supporters of OSM as a hiring thing - by supporting an opensource project, you will get young engineers interested in mapping, some of which will then go work on Google Maps. It also helps any antitrust cases if Google isn't the only game in town, which was the case for many years.
6y ago

vulcan01 6y ago

> I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears. Cue Googler who will find this comment and magically fix this problem. The HN effect.

zalebz 6y ago

I think the answer is to put up a gate with keypad and just provide the code to the landowner that has right of way. expensive but 100% effective.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Talanes 6y ago
Even a gate with just a rope latch would give most people pause.
- mark-r 6y ago
  You'd need to get cooperation from the other folks using the road that they'd replace the rope after driving through.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    You'd need more cooperation to put a pin-code activated electronic gate up.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      But at least the gate would automatically close once they went through.
      - Talanes 6y ago
        Just need a gate that exerts tension when it's opened, so it'll drift back to closed if someone forgets. I've crossed a lot of back-country gates, never seen a wild breakdown of the system.
        mark-r 6y ago
        Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. You can't do that with a rope.

diogenescynic 6y ago

And Google intentionally make it difficult to get ahold of any actual human. I really hope they get broken up, they are clearly a monopoly and abuse their power.

colejohnson66 6y ago

IANAL, but would it be possible to sue Google (in small claims) over the nuisance?

meowster 6y ago
What are the monetary damages, and how can you prove Google caused the damage?
- paulmd 6y ago
  The monetary damages would be determined based on the level of nuisance caused, which could be objectively measured by the data google keeps on trip routing that has utilized that particular road. Love the whole "nothing can be measured, who can say!?" attitude on Google of all fucking things. They log everything and delete nothing. Yes, they absolutely do know how many people they've routed down that person's driveway, and a subpoena/discovery would clear it right up.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Seeking damages seems silly, but I’m sure that’s something you could get a court to order Google to change. Technically you could make the argument that the map directions are incitement/solicitation to commit a crime. But I doubt you’d get a prosecutor to pick up that case.
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  Just make it up. This will never go to trial. Google's lawyers will see that the plaintiff is correct and make the change in maps.

diogenescynic 6y ago

Submit a complaint to a state regulator. Someone at Google will wake up and sort it out once they get an email from their regulator to Google’s compliance team. If you can get a lawyer to submit the complain it’ll be even more effective.

gruez 6y ago
What regulator would have jurisdiction here? Are maps even regulated?
- paulmd 6y ago
  A very flippant "HN techbro libertarian" response. Pretty much everything that is not constitutionally protected as a right can be regulated, why would you possibly think that it couldn't? Yes, you absolutely could lobby for someone to write a law requiring Google to respond to nuisance requests from their navigation services. That is basically what DMCA does, after all. Hypothetical example law: OK, you have a good-faith presumption up until someone emails you a copy of a deed and proves it's their driveway, then you legally need to correct it within X days or penalties start to rack up.
  - fuzxi 6y ago
    Your response is unnecessarily aggressive. His questions are innocent.
    - flemhans 6y ago
      I agree. And it resorts to name-calling. What's a techbro, anyway.
  - abeppu 6y ago
    You've said that stuff which isn't constitutionally protected _can_ be regulated, but the question posed was _are_ maps regulated. Are they? What legal obligation to accuracy or comprehensiveness are map-makers bound by? And are maps constitutionally protected? If political donations are speech then maps certainly seem like speech.

Thorrez 6y ago

>I’ve done the whole google maps support thing but no response and deaf ears. You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me. Full disclosure I work at Google, not on Maps, and I always did the suggest a change with my personal account.

SECProto 6y ago
> You've used the suggest a change feature within Maps? I've done that several times and I think it always worked for me. I've had a road that is mis-named near me. I've used the "suggest a change" feature multiple times, but have never gotten a response other than the automated "it'll be reviewed". Road is still mis-named. Other changes i've suggested have gone through in hours.
- visarga 6y ago
  Probably have to submit it to OSM and wait until Google loads their data into GMaps. /s
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    I think google don’t use OSM data.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      Well and yet this is what I did and it worked, after around a year of waiting.
      - Freak_NL 6y ago
        It is possible that whoever Google has hired for the local edits uses OSM as a reference in response to feedback received via Google Maps. Not explicitly of course, because this is strictly forbidden, both ways, due to license incompatibility. For OpenStreetMap this is a very important point, because well-meaning novice mappers copying streets or points-of-interest directly from a proprietary map put the project at risk of litigation. Google will likely have such a strong rule in their own internal documentation as well. OSM strongly discourages the mapping of trap streets — fake streets that only exist on your map for unscrupulous competition to copy so you know that they did so — but it's possible that some mappers do put these on the map. I don't think one of the big proprietary maps has ever been caught copying one of these though.

hypervisorxxx 6y ago

I love how this article talks about the neglect of the process from Google and probably says something significant about russia's relationship with google in general and google maps at the cost of two of their own citizens needlessly dying by freezing to death and in the top rated comments is bicker about whether an old couple should be the one to pay for a gate to stop accidental trespassing. I get the problems are both of the same origin, but the discussion has a much better chance of making progress and getting Google's attention which is hard to do when people's lives are at stake. Or when they have been lost directly due to their own oversights.

noja 6y ago

If you want a solution for this today: put up a sign, with a google maps logo on it saying "wrong way" in big letters, below it explain that google have wrongly marked this trail as a road.

fock 6y ago
they'll have a hard time, keeping up with the changing logo!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

FerretFred 6y ago

> I’ve done the whole google [*] support thing but no response and deaf ears Seems to be the Google way of doing things: they can't do everything with algorithms!

yarcob 6y ago

Apparently there are people who try to mark public roads as "private" on Open Street Maps to discourage Waze from sending traffic. But Waze seems to love sending people via quiet roads, so maybe that's why Google is ignoring you. They think your inlaws driveway is a nice shortcut and don't care who owns it.

sfifs 6y ago

Have you explored sending a legal notice through a lawyer?

petre 6y ago

Errect a signpost with a discouraging message.