Google maps sued for drowning death

In My Humble Opinion
361

If I had said “Hey, here are two opposing things all Americans say” or 'Why do most Americans always contradict themselves like this?", you would have sound basis for your complaint. I didn’t say anything like that, because I don’t think or believe that.

There are two apparently-contrasting viewpoints that I have heard enough to notice that I heard them. I wanted to understand where they come from . Of course when I ask a question, it’s impossible not to imagine what the potential answers might be. The potential answers I happened to consider in this case included:

  • Yeah, those are two different sets of people and they are in fierce opposition with one another; also they are pretty vocal, so your impression of how common that is in everyday life, might be skewed.
  • Yeah, those two contradictory views are held by this specific group of people who are in a state of congnitive dissonance; the way they notionally reconcile these two opposing thoughts is…[something]
  • Although you framed those two different things as opposites, they are not quite as simple as you stated them and are not in fact opposites in reality, because…[something]
  • Something else I haven’t considered
  • Some combination or permutation of the above, with the following interesting nuances…

Neither would I. Neither DID I. You made that up.

No. I wanted to know how those apparently different things are arranged.

362

Moderating

Aspenglow already asked folks to stop the personal attacks. That applies to everyone, including @ASL_v2.0

And this whole hijack about “what about Americans led to this” can stop now, as well.

363

I’m sorry. None of that went the way I intended or hoped.

364

The first person to look at his phone would see the maps app still open and that nice big fat blue line designating the recommended route. No search necessary

365

True, if they looked at the phone while it was still there at the riverside immediately after the accident.

If the phone was carried off somewhere else and the maps app was still active en route, it would have recalculated the route by the time anyone looked at it.
If the phone ran down and needed recharging (or drying out first), the maps app wouldn’t be open any more.

366

I just checked my phone’s Google maps and there actually is a place to click to show your last several trips. The wife’s description as stated in the article is pretty vague, though.

367

Lawyers for the Paxsons allege that several people have tried to flag the washed-out bridge to Google and have included email correspondence between a Hickory resident who tried to use the “suggest an edit” feature in 2020 to get the company to address the issue. Google never responded to the suggestion, allege attorneys.

This part I :100: believe. My address changed in 2011 when the town renamed roads with duplicate names, and gave official names to tiny roads like mine (just 3 houses on this road) that didn’t have names and previously were given addresses of the nearest named road.

Despite trying 4 times to tell Google Maps that the address has changed from 3DigitNumberAjoiningUSRoute### to 2DigitNumberNounRoad, it took until 2022 before Google Maps could “find” the house when people asked for directions. Never a response of any kind from Google to indicate that they ever even look at the form data.

368

I don’t know what you’re specifically replying to, but he could have switched to another app after he loaded up the directions. It’s not definite that Google Maps would have been the first app when his wife opened his phone.

369

I had to look hard for this, but yeah, there is a ‘timeline’ feature where you can review previous trips - can’t test it myself as I have location history turned off, but it does make it plausible that someone was able to search the phone and determine that Google Maps was tracking the route.

However (from memory) I seem to recall that Google Maps was able to show me routes I had driven and walked even when I had not been using it for navigation - it’s part of the reason I turned off location history - it was too intrusive (and it was asking me to review places I had just walked near to)

370

As far as I am aware, both of those things are true. I have no doubt that the family was able to determine that the victim used Google Maps to plot his way home. How did they determine that Google Maps routed him across the broken bridge, though?

The track can show he went over the bridge, but we know that. All that proves is that the track is accurate. The history shows he asked for the route, but that doesn’t show he was following it, and it doesn’t show it sent him over the broken bridge.

I frequently ask for routes from Google Maps, see how it recommends I get someplace, and then turn off the routing. I was shown the one or two turns I was unsure of, and can now handle navigation myself. (For example, is traffic so bad, I should divert from the shortest route?)

Even if at the scene of the accident, the phone was pulled from the car, and said to keep going across the bridge, that doesn’t mean Google Maps routed him over the bridge, it just means that now, near the bridge, it is saying to continue on that route.

Even if they asked for the same route from Google, it can be different on different days. In my neighborhood there are two routes to my house. Think different sides of a rectangle. They are essentially equal, and sometimes Google sends me one way, and sometimes another. I do not know if that was the case for the bridge.

I would accept if people in the area said that Google Maps always routed over the bridge, because it saved half a mile. There might be some other way they know he was following Maps, or this might be something that comes out in discovery, if Google even keeps that detailed of logs.

371

Yes, i frequently ask Google for a route, ignore it, but leave maps on (sometimes killing the volume) so i can see local traffic, or whatever.

"I was using Google maps when i went over this bridge <> “Google told me to go across this bridge”

372

Interesting argument but Google Maps still presumably said that the road was a viable path at the time.

373

Do we know that? I guess that’s what the picture up in post 4 tells us.

374

ISTM there would be a question of what are reasonable expectations.

So for me, as it’s not reasonable to treat “Tesla Autopilot” as if it truly drives itself, neither is it to just obey and not look before you follow your mapping app’s instructions.

I myself would not treat a consumer grade mapping app any different than a printed map, and the voiced “directions” no different than just some middling-witted passenger trying such map.

I mean I trust GPS to reliably tell me where on the Earth’s surface I am — but whether that spot is on a passable road is a different piece of information.

375

Yeah, especially if there’s a “legal road”. Google used to tell me that i could drive down a lane that had been overgrown for decades, and was totally impassable by car. But it was out in a rural area with little traffic of any kind, and it was still on all the printed maps, too.

376

Res ipsa loquitur.

377

But was anybody else in the car to listen to the directions speak? (If route guidance speaks in the woods and there’s nobody there to hear it…)

It’s easy enough to make a wrong turn on a dark and rainy night, even with nav software running.

We know the map data was bad. We know he looked up the directions. At some point in time the directions routed over the broken bridge. Is there any evidence to say that the reason he took the fatal turn was because that is where Google Maps told him to go?

Maybe there is such evidence, but I’m unsatisfied with an answer of “well, obviously.” I’m guessing he probably did follow the map directions across the missing bridge, but I don’t know my guess would be strong enough for even a civil trial.

378

“Probably” is precicisly the level of proof they need. And a jury could rely in “inferences” and circumstance evidence. The difficult part for the plaintiff will be establishing that Google is legally responsible, even if everything else they say is true.

379

If the phone had Location History turned on, it is possible (I’d go with probable) his wife and Google know the exact route he took because recording routes is one of the features of Location History.

If Location History was turned off but he was using Google Maps, it may still be possible to see what route he actually took because Maps will store that data on their servers. But it gets a little fuzzy at this point because while Google says the navigation data isn’t associated with your Goggle account, it doesn’t specifically say that that data can’t be traced back to be associated with an individual phone.

That’s how I understand it, anyway.

380

Even if it can’t be tracked back to a specific phone, it’s not like this was dense suburbia with dozens of cars passing that spot every minute. They can dig in their logs for every car that drove on that private toad that evening. It might be one car or it might be 4 cars. It won’t be 40. A little bit of cross-checking the time of day and there’s probably exactly one log entry it could be.

It’ll take some careful lawyering to make this process of elimination into valid evidence. But I have no doubt it’ll pass legal muster if the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed properly.