Magic earth is ok for nav but the problem with all openstreetmaps options remains the terrible search. This has been my experience for the past decade.
Recently the folks at jmp.chat released an alpha search which passes navigation intents in Android to the nav app of your choice, so I think we are getting close to a real alternative in the next few years.
In the past I have been surprised to encounter some genuinely privacy-minded folks working at Google.
It's hard not to see this as an announcement that era is ending now...
I de-Googled awhile ago, based on my personal belief that Google wouldn't keep those people. I'm not happy to feel like this verifies my worst expectations.
Money always comes first, for most of these companies. The era where your data was private is truly over. Now most of these platforms only give you a choice between your data being sold, and your data being sold for like a 2% cut
I was young in the 90s/2000s and it honestly felt like computing was a new stage for human progress.
I clearly wasn't the only one. There was the "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
I think the moral of all this is that fundamentally technology doesn't matter. If you don't have the public structures to reign in the oligarchs, shills and liars, you're not going to get anywhere.
We know what he wasn't doing. He wasn't preventing the leak of internal documents detailing how search works. Which is probably why he's fired. Someone has to take the fall. Kind of wonder if he's got a golden parachute.
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