Comments on: Google Maps: New Customer Complaint Arena

By: not happy

not happy — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:22:30 +0000

who does google maps think they are?
thought i’d have a look at my property on there site. ( i have a 6 1/2 foot brick fence for my families privacy) only to find their camera must be installed at least 12 – 14 feet so with out my permission they have taken a picture over my fence a full view of inside our house?
If it were anyone else taking pictures like this i would ring the police and have them charged..
what can we do?

By: Sarah Stewart

Sarah Stewart — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 12:49:42 +0000

I was furious when my friends told me ,when they were looking for properties for sale our house, my husband and our car were featured in close up on a Warners house for sale site. quite clearly taken by google and published by Warners. This photograph quite clearly states the number of the house that is for sale when you pan to the top of the photograph. What can I do about this invasion of my privacy? can anyone help?

By: You Deserve a Rake Today at Ickdonalds « Location Awhere

You Deserve a Rake Today at Ickdonalds « Location Awhere — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:13:25 +0000

[...] interesting posts over at Blumenthals.com (currently one of my new favorite blogs along with Maperture) about Google’s decision to allow [...]

By: MiriamEllis

MiriamEllis — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:13:59 +0000

Oh-ho, perhaps even better than this, Monsanto’s business listing sits beautifully unclaimed. Not that I’d do anything….

Miriam

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:44:11 +0000

@Miriam psst...psst...you didn't hear it from me but every McDonald's listing that I looked at sat unclaimed and "prime"d for a sweet, vegan community editor to beefup their listing. See this search. How about MickeyDeads or McCholesterol? Mike

By: MiriamEllis

MiriamEllis — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 06:34:12 +0000

vegans renaming McDonald’s to Burnt Flesh Heaven …..

Hmm, don’t give me any ideas, Mike.
Miriam

By: ben allen

ben allen — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:19:18 +0000

ah I gotcha. Yeah I always assumed that everyone InfoUsa, Axciom, etc always used the government data as a starting point anyway (Tiger/Census) and then built from there by hiring a small army of phone reps to make phone calls constantly to verify and update those listings throughout the year.

I am by no means an expert on this subject, but I believe that the folks like Navteq then buy the data from InfoUsa and Axciom and then try to further improve them by adding observations from their own street driving teams. Navteq then sells it to Google who then tries to improve it even further by layering in page scraping and Local Business Center data.

Sure, we could have the government do all of this themselves using taxpayer money… but frankly I am not sure the results would be any different.

And while I am sure not very many people will agree with me here, but I see many of these listings as essentially advertising. So I am not sure I want to use my tax money to help businesses advertise themselves to me for free using my own money. Something seems wrong there.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:06:50 +0000

@Ben

I am suggesting that the governments list of businesses is probably the best reflection of going concerns, they also know when someone closes their doors often more quickly than Google does.

I am only speaking in a theoretical sense that the market doesn’t always have the best solution.

For example the government could maintain a list, allowed measured changes to it and then like with ICANN allow users to update for a small fee. The argument that the market is the best solution is a religious based idea not a factual one. It works sometimes and not others.

Mike

By: ben allen

ben allen — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:01:40 +0000

Hey Mike, what is the best list of active businesses that you’re referring to that the government has? I am not familiar. If that’s true then it should be available to anyone in theory since its likely it was gathered with taxpayer money. From what I can tell Google seems to think that any one information source is not good enough which is why they use a three pronged approach of buying listings, and supplementing that with page scraping and the Local Business Center. While it obviously isn’t perfect from the discussion here, from what I’ve seen the thoroughness seems to blow away anything else I’ve seen from competitors.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:15:17 +0000

@Ben you have already pointed out that Google has little incentive to fix the problem, we can see that getting 15 million businesses to do anything is problematic.

We have already, as taxpayers, paid for the internet once, and continually pay to have our income and payroll taxes collected by the Government. They actually have the best list of active businesses and could provide that information in a sensible way for Google and everybody elses uses. Free market don’t really exist and when we try them (banking anyone?) they have a tendency to implode.

@David

Removing your listing, given how Google works, is unlikely to solve your problem. Google gathers primary business listings from companies that gather it from the phone books, the counties etc and then matches that up to information it finds on the web. As soon as they re-add a new list from one of their data suppliers your listing is likely to show back up. When it does it create a new cluster and reattach the old info from that directory.

You are stuck I am afraid with what Google has to offer.

Mike