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[–] 14 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Looking for an alternative to Google, this reminded me to look into Waze. And, wtf, I was not aware of the history of waze. I feel like I've caught an unregulated Wikipedia edit, too.

Waze started as FreeMap Israel. Of 3 founders, one has a wiki page, and is self-identifying as atheist and zionist. Meanwhile, Uri Levine's page's description of waze is "a traffic and navigation app that is meant to steal personal data from users". Is this something confirmed or is it just describing crowd-sourced data collection in a demonizing way? All 3 founders were in Israeli Unit 8200 cyber warfare, so certainly sounds concerning. I get that crowd sourcing has mixed opinions and keeps proving to be surveillance mashed with convenience, like tracking links or Pokémon go.

Google recently messed with the UI around the same time it changed the lake name, so I'm actively looking for alternates now. I tried mapquest knowing it's not the original mapquest group, but found it lacked a bit of functionality. Biggest issue is not being able to search along route. Is there anything else decent?

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Co-maps/organic maps is the current Foss options.Give those a try. Also contribute your local knowledge to open street Maps if possible.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Have to second Organic Maps, especially if you want a single app for driving and hiking/running/biking/etc. The trade-off is no live traffic or adaptive routing, which you can certainly learn to live without. (Don’t forget that alternative routing using paper maps used to be a common practice.)

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    No traffic analysis is fine, but I've been caught out by road work a few times and that does rather suck.

    There are some alternatives which also provide traffic data, though they each feel varying levels of clunky to use. There's Magic Earth (requires a cheap subscription for some functionality), also HERE WeGo ("free", also seems to offer its services to car manufacturers and some other things).
    The one I've used the most is one by my country's touring/driver's association, which in turn seems to rely on Mapbox. It's also kind of mid, but at least it's local.

    I am using all of these through Android Auto, which they each support, even if they don't support it very well.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Looking for an alternative to Google, this reminded me to look into Waze. And, wtf, I was not aware of the history of waze. I feel like I’ve caught an unregulated Wikipedia edit, too.

    Everything else aside, did not Google acquired Waze in 2013 ?

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