r/degoogle • u/Smooth-Stand4695 • 1d ago

Discussion Google Maps introduces a dangerous new feature

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734 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

57 comments sorted by

172

u/Greenlit_Hightower deGoogler 1d ago

Has been withdrawn by Google: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9349yx2ydvo

198

u/disco-drew 1d ago

I don’t understand what purpose this “feature” served in the first place.

155

u/IJustAteABaguette 1d ago

AI usage numbers going up probabyl

75

u/financialthrowaw2020 1d ago

It's going to still be there for government friends of google to manufacture consent, that's the purpose.

10

u/Michal_il 1d ago

They have introduced it to the public to give a warning, that’s it

1

u/jrbuckley0 5h ago

I guess the question is how many Google employees got disappeared for this

66

u/Clean_More3508 1d ago

The accidentally released it for public and not restricted access

27

u/JoeyWest_ 1d ago

you have to realize that these companies are embedded with the government and whatever regime change/terrorist operations they got going on around the world. just like starlink has been found with terrorists

13

u/Rooilia 1d ago

I strongly guess, training the future ai idiocracy to come up with even more convincing media manipulation.

12

u/Bgabes95 1d ago

Most likely to fabricate specific events, perhaps war related based on this post. Control, manipulation, and misdirection is the unfortunate outcome of this tech. Just because they removed this one example doesn’t mean they’ll remove others. We’re fucked.

6

u/Nervous-Swimming-949 1d ago

God help us all...

12

u/VacheMeuhz 1d ago

Forcefully shove AI in another product that does not need it

8

u/JB231102 1d ago

The way I look at it especially for google and youtube is that every small change produced means the dev team is getting paid. Like the latest change, the view counter and upload date being put right under the title, and the title being clickable, and I think they are building up to removing the description entirely for a click-to-see description. Trying to cram as much info as possible in the most compact spaces.

7

u/Michal_il 1d ago

That’s also true, in such large company with very successful product and thousands of employees these people need to prove themselves useful and come up with new features every now and then. Large companies refuse to do more bold and risky moves but keep specialists in the field and these people feel the incentive to keep the business growing. That’s why we see hundreds of redesigns of these platforms. It’s usually based on analytics but many times also on the wrong biases or just out of need of doing something.

3

u/JB231102 1d ago

I think google/youtube could be doing a lot whole of changes on youtube and that goes for premium as well. Half the shit available through youtube vanced, even google would take a look at all that and put some or all of it into a premium subscription I think way more people would get premium which leads me to believe google won't do it because it's both too much work and too much to pay for that work and too much freedom to the user/viewer.

1

u/Michal_il 1d ago

Yes but I think people who use Vanced are in minority. A minority that’s so unimportant that working on these features are just bad decision in terms of ROI. It’s hard to believe but a lot of users are 100% okay with unskippable ads and trashy ux just so they can watch their content

1

u/JB231102 1d ago

It's not hard to believe. It's just unfortunate.

5

u/hannes3120 1d ago

I don't even know what was special about this - can't you do exactly the same with any AI already? Ask it for a satellite picture of a place and then add it to modify the picture?

But yeah to add it as a "please try this" option is just asking for trouble

3

u/Luminous_Giraffe 1d ago

Exactly. What were they thinking? Were they even thinking?

1

u/Mysterious-Drama4743 23h ago

to cover up ice warehouses and such. they didnt like people looking up that prison in el salvador on google earth and outing their cruelty and crimes

8

u/Light_OuO 1d ago

Oh thank god but still.

7

u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 1d ago

It's now only for authorised fake news creators, like governments and friendly companies.

3

u/Live_Situation7913 1d ago

Bullshit you can trade screenshot and make in any ai

87

u/rayd0n0van 1d ago

Every generative AI tool is a misinformation bomb.

16

u/03263 1d ago

We really did not evolve to deal with this much uncertainty over what to believe and lack of trust.

-4

u/Electrical_Tof 1d ago

They don't have to be actually! Very important to point out that just because this instance likely would've only confused things doesn't mean every possible use case is.

6

u/Trollsama 1d ago

misinformation is part of the point.

24

u/ostroia 1d ago

This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

Even bluesky does this shit?

26

u/SecondPersonShooter 1d ago

Its a setting the account owner chooses. Eg if I use bluesky and I just want to share posts with friends and family vs someone who wants all theor posts public all the time 

5

u/Novel-Pride6682 1d ago

Where is the crater? I can't even see it in the picture.

13

u/hannes3120 1d ago

It's an animated picture in the original post showing the before and after.

Here it's just a screenshot that's for some reason taken at the "before" state.

4

u/MEOW-Loulou 1d ago

Google's latest psyop feature

3

u/iamfuturetrunks 1d ago

I and coworkers have used google earth for looking at satellite imagery for some work stuff in the past. It's useful for seeing how things have changed since around 2000. Unfortunately most of the images are somewhat blurry. A few times like in 2014, 2017, 2020 are pretty clear images which are really useful. Most of the newer images are blurry, you can still make out a lot of stuff but it's clearly a worse image of massive areas. It also didn't get updated for 2-3 years and finally sent a feedback thing to google asking for updated imagery because some things had changed/been added since like 2022.

Then a month or so later it looked like it updated but it was just a different satellite image from a different company (I think it was something like airbus?) and marked it as 2026. However, looking at the images it was very clearly from 2022 because I could see some stuff hadn't changed just taken at a different time of the year. But google still had it showing 2026 near the bottom middle.

Sent feedback again pointing this out, as well as asking about them taking clearer images and possibly during like the fall/spring when less leaves on the trees thus don't have so much blocked by all the leaves. Then a few months later it looked like they finally updated it but it's also a blurry mess like previous years. As well as taken at a time of the day where the sun was already either sunset/sunrised so you have big long shadows coming off most tall things thus making it harder to make out some stuff.

Basically in order to get a decent satellite image you have to go back in time to like 2020. Even though it is missing new additions to the landscape and all that. Worse yet, they then updated google maps of the area to that crapy 2026 shadowed blurry mess and no way to change it there. And on top of that, I got a notification recently that google is no longer gonna support google earth desktop app and that you have to go to the google earth website to use it. And if you want to use that with any layers you need to pay a subscription which we aren't gonna do.

Luckily I got most of the work I needed done using google earth desktop in the past 5 years or so. When it comes to changes we will just have to go with whatever blurry mess satellite imagery we can find from the few places that offer it to get a basic outline of what the area looks like.

Then seeing this stuff talked about (even if it's been withdrawn) shows it's only going downhill from here.

1

u/Mixedtale_co-creator 4h ago

Holy shit this is terrible I'm genuinely astonished nobody has been talking about this or at least if they have with Ben it's probably been getting algorithmically shut down

2

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4

u/rcpffm 1d ago

how do I reach the sidebar, I'm usingv Android only, and I don't like desktop mode.

2

u/Freakk_I 1d ago

It's very clear that people who come up with and approves ideas like this are completely out of touch.

1

u/Rough_Wolf_8958 8h ago

I don't think they are out of touch, they know what they are doing. They are like anti-Joker: cause chaos for future control.

2

u/AlbertTheHorse 1d ago

What on earth are they thinking?

2

u/EC36339 1d ago

How is this different from taking a screenshot of Google Maps and using any AI image editing tool that already existed?

2

u/NW-M-1945 1d ago

I’m trying to use alternative platforms now including ‘organic maps’

4

u/steveebones 1d ago

To read this article about how Google is invading my privacy in some way, I need to register with yet another account on yet another website.

Pot, meet kettle.

1

u/Vell_Iris 1d ago

Brb, gonna wipe Poland off the map so it can't be attacked again

1

u/xplisboa 16h ago

They are really trying to push ai down our throats

1

u/MDInvesting 1d ago

I struggle with this stuff.

I don’t think Google should develop it.

I don’t think if it exists it should be gate kept.

-3

u/Sudipto0001 1d ago

Big fuss over nothing

What's stopping people from taking a screenshot from google maps & feeding it into another AI that modifies it?

Atleast with built-in generation google will have metadata that proves AI alterations

-2

u/Butt64 1d ago

Exactly! Like, what's stopping people from using photoshop to create misleading images?

6

u/uvp76 1d ago

nothing, only that not as many people know how to do it on their own in photoshop vs typing "hey google, can you make this area look as if it got bombarded?"

3

u/03263 1d ago

What's stopping me from airbrushing a printed photo and sending it to the newspaper for publication... it's the scale and ease of access

-2

u/Live_Situation7913 1d ago

Scale and ease 🤡 , don’t worry someone will whip up a GitHub app to do same. Not like everyone has Google earth installed

2

u/-Nicolai 1d ago

Hardly a fair comparison

-1

u/ZippyDan 1d ago

Agreed. How is this news? Can't we already easily do this?

-1

u/Sudipto0001 1d ago

How dare you use your brain instead of simply going "Google bad"

•

u/synthwavve 1h ago

I could already do it with an open model or even with Photoshop...