this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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At least in terms of addresses, I feel like Magic Earth is significantly better than Organic Maps.
Agreed. Not FOSS though :(
Decent privacy policy.
Why do they need access to your phone, microphone, and contacts?
Yes, but as you say, they have a good privacy policy. Also their revenue model backs up their privacy policy, and I find their reasoning as to why they aren't FOSS fair:
(from the FAQ)
That's just saying "we want to sell access to our code, so we can't make it open source". Basically the definition of proprietary software, no?
Yes? Nobody was claiming they weren't proprietary.
My point was that it's not so much "fair reasoning" as just a statement of that fact.
Yes, but people were claiming they had a good reason not to be FOSS. They could have easily just not mentioned it at all but instead they name a reason that isn't an issue for many others.
That's a weird reasoning, as I can find plenty of FOSS that has paid "business" editions
Proprietary software is not a better privacy choice than free software
The two things are orthogonal
yes but the old school business model of selling access to code without giving someone a full on anal probe in the form of data collection is not bad. it's only because major applicationa became insane spyware that we all had to start screaming about FOSS in the first place.
Magic Earth is doing a great thing. they are giving you a decently private, "Just Werks" maps experience, while still making money to fund their business, which is necessary to make software that is high grade. if that involves proprietary code, then okay fine.
They are giving a great experience to the average user, even someone trying to be private or at least degoogled. I see no issue with Magic Earth.
Magic Earth isn't private as it sends back data. Even if it was, there is no way of doing they won't change something in the future.
I used to use it before Organic maps matured. Now organic maps seems to be the best option. I also use OsmAnd for a while but it is far to unstable and slow plus it takes up a lot of disk space.
But they don't have more data than organic maps since they're using OSM too.
They have live traffic data, which OSM doesn't have.
In terms of search, there are algorithmic ways to get smarter results compared to what is built in OSM per default. So if other users say that the results are better, magicearth might be doing some magic under the hood.
The post specifically mentioned POIs, and as far as I have tested (in France at least), Magic Earth has the same incomplete/missing POI database as organic maps, coming from OSM.
Thanks. Never heard of this before. I'll take it for a spin.