As I said above, and some agree, the driver gets 10% of the blame, Google 10% and the owners of the bridge 80%. Just becuase you are following a map does not absolve you of all responsibility, altho by far and away the owners of the bridge are the liable ones.
I used maps to find my way to my niece’s house, and the next time I clicked on the app that route was still there. Is it different for other people?
Oh, when you said “no search necessary,” I thought you meant it wasn’t necessary to search the entire phone, like looking to see what apps he had open and what he was doing with the phone before he died. You were just saying they wouldn’t have to search the Maps app because the route would still be loaded. I get it now.
Hah - we had booked a cabin in the NC mountains, for July, for an anniversary!
In our case, we’d been warned about Google not always being accurate (given an address; the place was in a privately-owned area). The owners gave us detailed directions, AND the GPS coordinates; without both of those, we could not have found the place. We did a fair bit of white-knuckling getting to it anyway - after dark, steep, and gravel roads.
Google Maps is occasionally on some kind of really, really fun drugs. The time I needed to make a logical left off a highway (was driving south, needed to go east). Just before the interchange, it suddenly said to turn RIGHT. I thought maybe I’d misremembered - and turned right. It had me do a U-turn in a quarter mile.
And the time it sent me PAST the entrance to a hotel, around a loop on a local road, back onto the interstate in the direction we’d come from, back 2 exits, leave the highway, make a U-turn, and go back toward the hotel… then drive past the entrance again. The second attempt, I decided to ignore it and just go into the parking lot.
I think it’s a classic Southern thing.
The article stated that one person had an e-mail trail, and several were prepared to testify that they had reported it. IIRC
So that to me easily meets the “foreseeability” question. The real question is whether it is reasonable to assume that people would rely on the Map over their own eyes. The warning stickers on my hair dryer lead me to believe that the stupidity of consumers can, in fact, be held against a corporation.
IANAL, but I could definitely see this hurting Google, if the evidence that he used Google Maps, and that multiple people had previously informed Google of the problem, can be proven.
It seems to me that their best bet is to settle out of court rather than have that precedent established.
Settling out of court isn’t precedential in the legal sense of the word, but it sure suggests that suing Google Maps after a crash is a successful way to collect some free go-away money. Which will doubtless trigger a vast array of similar opportunistic suits.
The one and only “report-to-Google” message we’ve seen was so incompetently written that the only thing any human analyst could do with it is order an in-person visit to the site to try to decode what that idjit was trying to say. Whether Google has (or should have) any such capability is an open question.
And it all comes back to “duty”. A well-understood, if sometimes wooly, legal concept. Google could be utterly slovenly in their map updating and they would be 100% suit-proof as a matter of well-settled law. If they have no “duty” to the drivers using their maps as part of that driver’s overall navigational and car operating activities and responsibilities. And there is a darn solid legal argument to be made that Google has no such duty.
And there are conditions where you think you can see the road in front of you, but you’re mistaken; these conditions happen regardless whether you’re using navigation assistance or not. Bad luck and misperception etc can just happen either way.
There are at least 3 edit suggestions referenced in the complaint and they all clearly state that the problem is where the 24th St Pl NE road passes over Snow Creek or they expressly geolocate where the washed out bridge is in Maps to within feet.
Thanks. I should have read the actual complaint. As you say, there were 2 reports about 2 years earlier and they are much clearer that the bridge is out than the report quoted in the CNN article.
Yeah. I too was going from the info in this thread, not the actual complaint: tl;dr. Oops on me.
Which makes me wonder why the article chose to quote the least explicit warning.
You would expect Google’s threshold for acting on public input would be scaled to the amount of traffic in an area. A couple reports on a busy urban artery would be shelved, needing a lot more corroboration to reach the threshold of “probably real; not a mistake, something temporary, or a prank”. Out in the boonies just a couple ought to suffice. Ought.
It’s a logical strategy, but if your goal is to ‘maximize users impacted per report processed’ then you would probably prioritize by reports per location.
You would think Google would use their own NLU to prioritize things like ‘bridge washed out’ and ‘driver died’. It’s possible they do and their investigative team is small.
It would probably be worth Google including some dropdown box or something in their ‘report an issue’ dialog - with choices including ‘I am reporting a hazard’ - so that Google could perhaps prioritise the workload.
I reported the absence of an Amazon locker and it was rectified within a couple of days. I’d prefer to wait in line if there are reports of actual hazards.
Edit: I forgot. OK - they do, but the choices are:
- Wrong pin location or address
- Missing place
- Add or fix a road
- Wrong information
- Your opinions
Which I find interesting, because if I was going to report something that I considered to be a serious risk to life and limb, the above list of options would, I think, clue me in that this wasn’t a very effective place to do that.