[LINK] RIP Google Maps Contour Feature

[Richard Chirgwin]

Finishing my previous thought ... the upside of the Geosciences 
Australia maps is that (a) they don't come with privacy invasion, and 
(b) they include placenames that Google ignores - like places on tracks. 
Eg: Kedumba Crossing (on my list but not yet walked) appears on GA and 
not on Google.

(I think I'm heading for a Google ban, given the company's rampant and 
shameless tax evasion)

RC

Roger Clarke wrote:
> I'm a fairly frequent user of Google Maps (particularly for walking 
> in Australian, Swiss, Austrian and Italian mountains).
>
> But my time left using Google Maps may be even shorter than my time 
> left doing 1000m walks.  So it looks like I need to go looking for an 
> alternative.
>
> And I'm a realist:  there aren't any at this stage that are anywhere 
> near as good.  (Even though all they're doing is cleverly processing 
> obscure-looking national data and cleverly displaying the results in 
> accessible formats).
>
>
> Why is my time up?
>
> Because Google has just withdrawn the valuable Contours feature.
>
> They've replaced it with Earth, sold as '3D'.
>
> (So we need goggles to go with our Google viewing now??).
>
> But of course that sucks you in ('bait and switch', as the Yanks say).
>
> It requires you to download software which does who-knows-what.
>
> And I'd have to delve deeply into various places to try to work out 
> what the terms and the privacy policies are, and what they mean;  and 
> I'd have to monitor them as well;  and I expect that I wouldn't end 
> up liking what I found.  (I've got all the tools I need at my 
> disposal, so I'm well set up to do the analysis;  but this becomes 
> very boring after a while).
>
> As demonstrated by recent posts from multiple sources, Facebook has 
> been, well, almost bare-Faced in the trickery it's prepared to use to 
> exploit its users' data.
>
> To be fair, Google's practices aren't quite as pernicious as Facebook's.
>
> But there's more than enough evidence to support an extension of 
> Google's own proposition that 'Google knows a lot about you ...' to 
> include '... and Google intends knowing even more'.
>
>
>