Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
what's a good alternative if one's using GMaps mainly for travelling instead of navigation (i.e. looking up nearby restaurants and getting reviews, public transport, attractions and their opening hours, etc.)?
Organic maps is what I use. Keep in mind OSM is built by the community so in places with lower tech literacy it will incomplete
Used to know someone who looked for cars around a restaurant, or long lines waiting to get into a tiny cafe, asked wait staff for interesting places they liked to go; went into non-chain stores where locals shopped (off the main streets); asked walkers and service station workers for directions. Always had wild stories about what happened, if you could get past their private nature. Weird fucker, unpredictable, never could get used to'm. Likeable enough, though.
Because we use OsmAnd
Who in their right mind would charge a subscription fee to download and/or update maps?
Edit: I only found out about this after my father downloaded the app on his phone, and it said he only has 5 downloads remaining before downloading the map for my state. It's extremely dumb for a "privacy focused maps app"
Only from walled garden app stores, the full unrestricted OSMAnd APK is available for free without restrictions from fdroid
Not if you have an iphone.
Thats a known issue with iPhone though. Nothing new added
If you really want to you can just download them outside the app for free. I like that it provides a free option for those with more time than money and a paid option for those with more money than time.
Because development is not free
But isn't it open sourced? Can't they have like a buymeacoffee? Not lock the most important feature behind a paywall?
It's not locked, build it yourself or download the apk from fdroid. If that is too complicated for you (or anyone else), maybe pay for the service being provided then?
Normal people: Gladly give google maps access to location data at all times and never think about it
Me: Instinctively worry that on the rare occasions I do use google maps it's somehow identifying me and keeping track of all the locations I look at, so I sometimes look at random places I'm not really interested in just to throw off the algorithms.
But most of the time I prefer osmand.
Use fossdroid
Or have your phone location turned on and be super boring back and forth. When you deviate use a burner.
Me: can't install Google Maps because my phone doesn't have gapps. Awesome.
Oh yeah, I tend to forget that there's an app and it's not just a website.
Oh, yeah, I do use the website sometimes to convert an address to GPS coordinates and load that into OSMAnd
You have been free for a while then i suppose.
Osmand is really cool and it's really capable but I understand that it isn't for people who don't want to tinker a bit to make things work just right for them.
For that Organic Maps is what I recommend.
I daily drive osmand. Where do you need tinkering there?
Idk how the new user experience is now but back when I first downloaded it I wanted a hybrid of sat imagery when cell signal allowed, with an overlay of offline OSM data. This was for two reasons, hiking and to see if the mapping in that hike area needed any major land use edits.
Anyway I had to fiddle with the menus and settings for a while to get the overlays where I wanted it to be. Don't get me wrong I was able to figure it out but for users who want to install and go it can be understandably frustrating
The UI is definitely confusing for OSMand