So you admit on a public internet forum you're plotting something. Real smart. Expect some suits at your door momentarily.
Any standalone GPS users here still?
- Thread starter celicaxx
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In your dreams.
A friend still keeps a Garmin Nuvi with ancient maps on it. I still have my factory Toyota/Aisin navigation system with a 2008 era map disc in case Google Maps or Apple Maps fails beyond the city and suburb limits.
I’m sure if I use the voice navigation it will cause my aftermarket radio’s interface to crash.
I’m sure if I use the voice navigation it will cause my aftermarket radio’s interface to crash.
Think so?
I know so. Although I don't want to get into politics here I will state for the record that I am a bona-fide enemy of the state and anti-government extremist that provides IT and encryption services to various anti-government organizations. So go ahead and send those guys over, they'll get a warm welcome here.
Wife and I still have one each. Always in the car, no need to do anything but to start the car (auto power on/off, cig lighter is on switched 12V). I think updates can downloaded to them, might look into that--before we'd replace every few years, for bigger and better, but the latest pair have everything we want.
Most of the time they are just there for the ride, we aren't going many places we haven't been before. [Actually I think mine might be in the backseat, either fell down or got swapped between vehicles.]
Most of the time they are just there for the ride, we aren't going many places we haven't been before. [Actually I think mine might be in the backseat, either fell down or got swapped between vehicles.]
While that's true, I don't think you realize that I don't care and it doesn't matter. Heat death of the universe is in 10 to the 1000 years. Oceans will boil off in about a billion years when the output of our sun increases 10% not to mention the red giant phase in 5.4 billion years when it will expand past the orbit of earth.
You have no idea what they may be doing or what they will be doing with voice data in the future. I don't trust Google or other tech giantsa and do not use any Google, Microsoft, or Apple products, nor do I use Alexa or any voice control gadgets. What I may be plotting is none of your business or Google's.
Google admits partners leaked more than 1,000 private conversations with Google Assistant
Google on Wednesday admitted that partners who work to analyze voice snippets collected when people talk to the Google Assistant were leaked to a Belgian press outlet.www.cnbc.com
While I commend you wholeheartedly 100%, I end up having to love Big Brother to some degree in my modern life. But, there's always little things I could be doing better, it's just to some extent to participate in modern life you need to be on the same standard as others, in this case, Facebook, Google, etc. If you're as old as the man in your avatar maybe it doesn't matter as much, but when you're young it seems to matter more. It sucks and these companies suck, but if everyone around you uses said stupid platforms, it gets difficult. But, I at least try to opt out of as much as possible, including using no voice recognition at all on my phone, etc. How much they honor their agreements? Probably not fully, or almost definitely not fully.
From a technological perspective specific to standalone GPS, I'm just a big fan of redundancy. I just don't like relying on one single magic device to do everything, I like having backups. What prompted this thread was my phone was dying, and I got really really lost DEEP in the woods late at night, and having a standalone GPS as a backup would have been a saver for sure. Thankfully after 10 minutes pulled to the side of the road, my phone revived, but without it I would have been in trouble, I was just crazily lost. Now I have a newer and more reliable phone, but what's to say it won't eventually fail, too? Or have some network issue in some area, Google maps farts out due to some coding bug, etc. It's like Spotify or Apple music vs a plain mp3 player or a CD player. One is ALWAYS going to have your music short of physical failure, one may cut out deep in the woods, or in a tunnel, etc. So a standalone GPS seems incredible in that context, and from a distracted driving perspective I won't have text messages popping up, stock tickers popping up, phone calls coming (that are usually spam anyway) etc, when I'm driving. The phone could just remain in my pocket. I'm not the type to talk on the phone in the car even hands free or with bluetooth as most calls for me aren't that important for me personally.
Weirdly in daily life in the US I find I probably could live without my smartphone and just run a standalone GPS and maps, have a desktop and laptop, and probably be pretty OK. When I was overseas in Asia was actually where I started to see the utility of some of this newfangled smartphone stuff. The ability to instantly book taxis, hotels, find any place on a map and guide yourself there in real time turn by turn when you can't even read the signs around you, pull up Google translate to ask locals a question, it's amazing. In USA I don't need this as I'm not generally driving more than 20 miles from home 90+% of the time, and am so oldschool I'd rather just call a pizza place the old fashioned way to order than use Doordash or some other dumb thing like that.
I had a friend in Taiwan that was more paranoid than me or probably you and had zero cell phone, so I could only communicate with him via email, and I messed up at our meeting spot/time and missed seeing him my last day in the city he lived. If he even had a basic flip phone, I was only about a 10 minute walk away, so we still could have met if he just had a phone. By comparison, I had plenty of weird late/wrong spot/etc times (I'm in a foreign country so I don't know how long everything takes/etc) with my other friend in another city, but we could use the phone to fix it.
But hey, if you can live without the stuff, more power to you.
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If big brother and the brave new world doesn`t concern citizens any longer freedom is over. We get the government we deserve.
In all fairness, while we blame the government, it's more about social control. I'd not use Facebook at all, except my friends stopped talking to me on other older IM platforms as time went on, and eventually my girlfriend coerced me into getting it. I was also missing out on years of car classifieds since ads on Craigslist trickled down to nothing compared to how they used to be, and Facebook became the new default car listing site. The government didn't make me get Facebook, though. Would the government prefer I have a Facebook compared to not having one? Almost certainly.
As much as we blame the government for whatever, social control via our family, friends, financial obligations we generally get ourselves into to impress/make our friends and family happy (ie, need a brand new car for the wife to be happy) matters significantly more than any governmental decree. This is not to say the government doesn't subtly influence decisions usually on big corporate levels, though. At the end of the day, nothing says I can't drive a 1980s carbureted car around with only paper maps, use an old Pentium 4 computer running Linux, tell everyone who wants to communicate with me to only use my private dedicated IRC server, have a flip phone with a removable battery when I'm out, etc, etc. It's only social control that really prevents you, because people want to be like everyone else. The government takes advantage of that.
You don't actually know that. Alexa data has been requested in court proceedings before, firstly.
The concept that would be used with that data is parallel construction. If you're a cocaine dealer and you're meeting to buy a kilo of coke from your supplier, and the police and/or federal government are illegally using that data, they have your exact location always, they find out you're meeting your supplier at midnight that night. You meet your supplier and get your cocaine, everything is swell, and you start driving home. Suddenly the police are coincidentally behind you, with a coincidental drug dog in the car, and pull you over for speeding 5mph over, and also coincidentally search the car and find cocaine. So yes, the data won't be used directly in a court proceeding, but the data was used to influence an outcome. You can do the same with a murder or robbery plot by arresting members of the party for gun possession a week prior in a seeming "random" way, too.
I believe it's been requested, but it wasn't actually provided when there was actually no recording made. Also I'm not a drug dealer or other type of criminal so I'm not at all worried about it. It's a big jump from a private company having the data to it ending up with the police. I wish Google would catch all the criminals that use their email system for crimes. The main problem with all these theories is that there's a limit to resources that can be deployed. The war on drugs has been going on for decades. Yeah in theory one crime can be stopped with enough resources, but it's never been enough. Notice how the solve rate for murders and other crimes never really approaches 100%?
An upside to the police state is crime has actually gone down drastically since the 80s and 90s. Murder was 10 per 100K back then, now we're at a national average of 5, basically like the 1950s. Robbery now happens at a rate of 86 per 100K, in 1991 it was at 272 per 100K. Even without the government monitoring stuff, cell phones contributed to lower crimes really drastically, as you could call the police immediately after you were victimized, and take videos of crime as it happened later on.
Crime in the United States - Wikipedia
So yeah, it never approached a perfect 100% solve rate, but the results are there for sure. Interestingly, even property crimes are about halved since the 1990s, too.
Sorry to dig up an old thread but I'm feeling the same way a few others are here. Having a standalone GPS would have come in handy a few times where my phone had no signal and/or didn't have maps downloaded. I found an old Nuvi 52 in my mother's old car and I've stuck it in my car just to see how it works. I think I'll keep it and be sure to pack it along with other essentials any time we go on a trip, it would be very nice to have 'just in case'.
I'm waiting to see what my wife does. Her new Camry did not come with nav but it has whatever Apple support for the infotainment center. I *think* she can download a map to her phone and/or use whatever mapping stuff is on her iPhone and somehow pass that to the dashboard and then read the map through the LCD. She hasn't gone anywhere yet where this is needed so I don't think she's tried it out.
It might have lifetime map updates. You can hook it up to a computer and see if you can update the maps. Or just have the area downloaded to your phone. I think my phone has 128gb and the maps only take up around 200-400 megs for the local area out to the next state.
I have been gravitating off of the phone map applications, due to Big Brother concerns. I honestly don't like the level of invasive spying done thru our phones.
I prefer the standalone models. I do NOT like the nav system down low on the stereo console, I like it up high by my line of vision. True, they are a bit on the clunky side, and the wires are annoying. I solve that by running the wires up into and behind the dash so they come out over left of my steering wheel. This is very un-obtrusive. I can take a picture if anyone needs to see what I'm referencing. I also don't like the nav systems thru the stereo because it is too cumbersome to use the music and the navigation, or the phone and the navigation, etc. Running two competing programs on 1 system is just annoying.
You can get stand alone Garmins for about $30 on the used market, and most come with a free software upgrade package which is easy to update. That is an excellent bargain.
I have stand alone units in 6 of my 7 vehicles. The only reason not in my Challenger is because it has a built in on-screen navigation system and I generally only take that for pleasure rids where I want, not a real destination. I will probably get a stand alone to keep in the glovebox in the event I need it.
I prefer the standalone models. I do NOT like the nav system down low on the stereo console, I like it up high by my line of vision. True, they are a bit on the clunky side, and the wires are annoying. I solve that by running the wires up into and behind the dash so they come out over left of my steering wheel. This is very un-obtrusive. I can take a picture if anyone needs to see what I'm referencing. I also don't like the nav systems thru the stereo because it is too cumbersome to use the music and the navigation, or the phone and the navigation, etc. Running two competing programs on 1 system is just annoying.
You can get stand alone Garmins for about $30 on the used market, and most come with a free software upgrade package which is easy to update. That is an excellent bargain.
I have stand alone units in 6 of my 7 vehicles. The only reason not in my Challenger is because it has a built in on-screen navigation system and I generally only take that for pleasure rids where I want, not a real destination. I will probably get a stand alone to keep in the glovebox in the event I need it.
It's a Nuvi 52, from everything I've read it doesn't have lifetime map updates but I may still get the software and hook it up just to see.
I try to keep the Google Maps updated with downloaded maps but the battery thing is more an issue than anything.
Maybe it's my cheap phone but it seems like the Garmin is more responsive.
What invasive spying that is being done on your phones and what do you think it's being used for?
It's your cheap phone. Have no issues with mine. Don't even have to put in the address. Normally I just check the route/traffic on my computer with the address and when I pull it up on my phone, it knows the last places I looked up so all I have to do is select it. Or I just use the voice feature and say the address and it pops right in. The Garmin takes a little bit longer to put in the address but their input method is pretty decent also. Only annoying thing is if you get a call while driving but you can usually suppress the call info and switch back to the map quickly. Hardly anyone calls anymore so not as big an issue these days as it was years ago.
I was a long time user of my phone for navigation; it seemed helpful and harmless. A couple years ago I found a feature on Google that showed every location I'd ever traveled since I got a smart phone. That is a concerning level of monitoring and invasion of privacy. If that was a person, I'd get a stalking restraining order!
Now, my location is turned OFF on my phone. And I don't use it to navigate absent a emergency where I have no other option.
^^^ THIS. Back when I used my phone for nav, many many times I would have this problem. It was often at a critical juncture where I needed to know my turns but also needed to take the phone call and it was extremely clumsy distracting event trying to juggle 2 operations on 1 device that were both competing for attention on a 2"x3" screen.... Very distracting while trying to also drive.
It's far more seamless to be able to take the call, while the separate nav device is providing background info.
