100% glad someone states the obvious. Sometimes here people think these tech companies are on truly altruistic missions on making “the world a better place!!1” or truly making an impact by being an IC in their role and having access to perks which, have largely been taken away as the market matures to data collection and surveillance.

If you want to have some fun, go on LinkedIn and see how many former military people, proud of their service, boast how they are at x or y tech company in director esque roles.

Then bookmark them and see the pages disappear in the future. Boy I’m glad it’s legally 100% ok to scrap LinkedIn data because it truly is a revolving door.

RCS is google's foothold. It forces everyone to share with google and currently, there is no carrier option for RCS. You have to pick google or apple or go without.

agree with you but including netflix is becoming hilarious

Since you are getting no replies but getting downvoted I'm adding source from 2016 corroborating what you mention: https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-rev...

251 individuals in such detected instances just in google. And that report is 10 years old, I'd bet it's 10x that by now.

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The DOJ isn't part of the Judiciary branch, it's part of the Executive.

> FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door

Most of the NSA is active duty service members and former military. Did you mean other three letter agencies, excluding the most powerful one dealing with surveillance?

> Any judge that attempts to interfere with Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system

The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?

Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.

> Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage

Please. The Androidfication of iOS with malware/scamware would cost quadrillions in market damage.

https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/searc...

GNIS, Geographic Names Information System

(Which still shows Lake Ontario for me as I write this. The body of water along the US's southern coast is Gulf of America however.)

The government does not control the words you or I use to refer to things.

It would be nice if Maps would prefer data from government DBs that have localized versions of foreign place name data (e.g., Germany's BKG) when available.

It makes perfect sense that govs control names within their jurisdiction - I am eyerolling at both the name change and the reaction.

I am curious though - is it convention to leave the data as is, or is it illegal to modify it?

Regardless, itll just be changed back in 2 years; as long as I can type "lake ontario" and get directed to Lake Ontario, I do not care at all what the gov database calls it currently.

I too remember last year when everyone really cared about that and it was the end of the world and then we got on with our lives because at the end of the day it not only doesn't matter, the naming of these things is arbitrary, and anything that a president can change the name of a subsequent president can modify yet again.

What do they call the South China Sea, is it the East Sea or is it the West Philippine Sea? What do the French call the English Channel? Is it Le Manche d'anglaise?

There is no bad PR, 99% of people don’t care.

There are thousands of small street changes across the country each day. New subdivisions, road expansions, lane changes, new traffic lights. Of course the vast majority should be auto-updated without manual review, what would a person add to the process? The public database is the system of record in the first place.

Corporations being only "groups of people" is kind of wishful thinking. They are one cog in a large machinery that is steered by a few very rich people.

Corporations should not be absolved of criticism. But at the same time it makes little sense to put a hamster in hamster wheel and then blame him for running.

> If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario

This is the same logic that the right wing used when they disagreed with Obama on some issues, so they blocked his Supreme Court nominations just because anything Obama does must be bad.

Sounds like your social circle is in denial. There are certainly plenty of things Trump, buffoon and graft-a-holic he is, has done that are corrupt. Renaming bodies of water doesn't look like one of them. (Obviously, because he would have renamed it after a donor, or at least after himself.)

I mean, sure, we can all call anything whatever. I can call New Mexico "Best Mexico" or call Washington, DC "Bad Washington" and that's my right. But pretending that there aren't official names for things because we don't like the current guy seems immature. It's clearly within the authority of the government. Talk like this makes me think that people want to just live in a reality defined exclusively by party politics where we just pretend every law or policy made by The Bad Party doesn't exist, rather than try to win elections so we can shape the one actual reality.