MapQuest will now show you where Flock cameras are in your neighborhood

13 hours ago (engadget.com)

This shows the license plate readers i added last week on openstreetmap so we know where the data comes from. Nice render on their map - even shows camera direction

i added generic LPR’s - and they show on mapquest, so be aware its not just flock on their map.

To enable the view on mapquest, i could not figure it out on web, used ios app; layers / surveillance

Ios app; https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mapquest-gps-navigation-maps/i...

This is how you start getting the users back. The Lake Ontario naming situation pushed me to using them. It has been working great in CarPlay. My wife loved the unicorn. I get to avoid (or hunt) Flock cameras. Everyone wins.

  • It’s incredible just how quickly Google and Apple folded to the will of their country’s king renaming stuff.

  • What no? It's pandering. Pandering of course works, that's why it's done. But just because you're the one being pandered to, doesn't mean it's not pandering.

  • Mapquest is reliable for you in CarPlay? I tried it out after the Lake Ontario incident, and it was hanging and crashing left and right.

  • > The Lake Ontario naming situation pushed me to using them

    I hate the name change too but it did go through official channels, so what else is a map provider supposed to do? Should they have also refused to rename Mt. McKinley to Denali? I mean, I'd actually be proud to see an overtly partisan declaration that they won't honor a single name change from this administration, but that's a much different matter than taking it case by case. I suspect the real reason the rename hasn't happened is that MapQuest's software simply isn't capable of doing it gracefully.

    Also, hope you have a good adblocker when you use MQ. They are owned by bottom feeders of a sort that makes Bending Spoons look like the FSF.

    • > what else is a map provider supposed to do?

      Deferring to Government naming is only one possible approach. OpenStreetMap takes another: “the name that people use on the ground”. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico in OSM and will remain so until popular parlance changes.

    • The proposed rename breaks the HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Eerie, Superior) acronym all of us in Michigan learned, and is thus doomed to failure. Because SHAME is a much worse acronym.

    • What "official channels" exist for renaming things that aren't even within your borders? It's less like renaming McKinley to Denali and more like "renaming" the Atlantic Ocean to the America Ocean. It's blatantly stupid, not acknowledged by most human beings, and won't last five minutes in history, and all of these facts are obvious to anyone who isn't stupid or corrupt, so what is the big mystery? What are they supposed to do besides what? You either adopt a frivolous rename or you don't.

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    • > I hate the name change too but it did go through official channels

      LOL, the Trump appointed buffoon at USGS who fell over himself to tell Trump in a memo that he'd gone ahead and made it happen even before it was official?

      Good thing it's official, then. That's what matters.

This data all stored in OpenStreetMap via DeFlock and other apps. One thing that should be said is that anyone can plot a camera via these apps whether or not one is actually there or not. I know that OSM community has been dealing with a lot Flock related vandalism because of these apps.

  • The full export of OSM is about 2TB but the US is only around 100GB even if you go to insane levels. It's disproportionately large because there are a hell of a lot of OSM-ers in the US ;-)

    Anyway what we should do is keep a few clean snapshots of the US as a backup, on hosting safely outside the US - or US-owned companies.

dam Mapquest? if they make a project that shows me directions, not photos of food at restaurants, ads for fast food, etc ill start using them

I had no idea MapQuest still existed. How have they survived the past 15 years?

  • I’d say the majority of their users are probably older. People who started using it based on familiarity from when they first used it a decade ago (or more). I do know my in-laws refuse to use Google/Apple Maps, because it’s “what they know”.

Great idea - it's your "driving directions" app that decides if you drive by these cameras, or not!

Countdown til Flock’s PR firm resets the controversy movement by renaming the company and it takes the public 5+ years to catch on again.

Very cool to see, and I'm curious if they'll start logging where Axion cams are next (if DeFlock doesn't already have Axion cameras logged). Also like how MapQuest doesn't lock multiple destinations behind needing an account, at least for the desktop version.

TIL that there is a surveillance tech company named Axis Communications and it remains true that our societal self awareness is terrible.

I guess this is Mapquest's business model. Don't cuck to the Trump admin when he changes the name of a body of water on a whim, and show us where obtrusive technology is so we can avoid it. Cool

Wow. This is one unexpected comeback.

And as a former Google Maps employee... I'm loving it.