Well well well. All it took was a regime change and the persistent abuse of camera networks by police officers to change MapQuest from “Remember MapQuest?” nostalgia to “hey where can I download MapQuest” demands.
First, there’s the regime change. Trump has been stupid as fuck all the time since day one but nothing was much stupider than issuing an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Oh wait. There was more stupidity. Trump — again saying anything that momentarily glanced off the shiny, wrinkless lobes of his forebrain — demanded Lake Ontario be renamed “Lake America.”
If that were the end of the story — a wet-brained spray-tan-maxxing fuckmook participating in some short attention span jabbering between hours of Truth Social doomscrolling — we wouldn’t be here today discussing this latest turn of events.
But Trump said something and companies started doing something. Some even started doing something before the spittle dried on Trump’s lips, as Karl Bode discussed earlier:
Google was the first to quickly make the change to appease Trump; in fact they acted so quickly on this the change to Google Maps happened before the government had even finished implementing it. Apple was very quick to follow suit, despite the fact that nobody at the company actually supports the ridiculous and pointless change.
That’s how tech billionaires greeted this momentary outburst from a guy who’s never bothered to think twice. One company altered its map before it was even made official. The other did it even though no one in the company actually wanted to have it done. These are the actions of two of the richest and most powerful companies in the world — companies whose fortunes would have dipped to the equivalent of a rounding error if they’d chosen to reject this overture.
Meanwhile, one of the first names to the (map) game refused to play along. MapQuest doesn’t have billions of revenue to spare, much less the ubiquity of companies that offer phones as well as pre-installed map apps. MapQuest once owned the digital mapping world, but it has been sidelined by vertical integration.
Maybe it’s just because MapQuest (relatively) has nothing to lose. Or maybe it’s because MapQuest actually seems to care about its users. Either way, MapQuest refused to alter its map to reflect Trump’s digital takeover of Lake Ontario.
And now MapQuest is going after America’s surveillance state — one made most infamous by another company that has far more liquidity than MapQuest: Flock Safety. While it’s certainly not the first company to offer automatic license plate readers, it’s the most famous. Its network is huge, capable of capturing 20 billion plate reads a month. And it’s the current favorite of law enforcement agencies all over the US.
But Flock is working against its own ubiquity at the moment. It’s more famous now for allowing cops to stalk people, especially ex-wives and girlfriends, as well as any people their exes might now be seeing. It’s also a handy tool for cops who just want to track people, including anti-police violence protesters or anyone else who’s annoyed them.
People want to know where these cameras are. Flock’s tools have generated a ton of public records that have ultimately given activists the ability to locate and map camera locations. Other companies working with law enforcement have generated some data as well, albeit not as much as the current market leader.
MapQuest now offers what other map apps don’t: a handy map of ALPRs.
MapQuest users in Canada and the U.S. can now see where some surveillance cameras have been set up in their communities.
The company introduced a “surveillance layer” earlier this week that uses animated eyes to mark where automated licence plate readers, or ALPRs, have been set up by police or others.
“We knew that there were a ton of cameras in use and documented in the U.S. and Canada,” MapQuest general manager Doug Berger told CBC News. “You would never know unless they were pointed out to you.”
This is very cool. For multiple reasons. A company deciding to highlight law enforcement surveillance on its official app is completely unexpected. That it did this because some of its users asked it to is even better, which means MapQuest cares more about its (relatively) small number of users than Google and Apple care about their millions of users who default to their apps simply because its part of their smartphone’s pre-installed ecosystem.
And that means MapQuest will continue to grow, three decades after its debut. GM Berger noted that the company gained three million new users after refusing to rename Lake Ontario. Adding a “surveillance layer” just means more deliberate interaction from users. And people who choose apps for a reason, rather than just using whatever first presents itself to them, are far more loyal.
This is a very smart move by MapQuest. The decisions it has made in the last couple of months shows it’s far more respectful of its current and future users than the massive tech companies that assume (often correctly) that consumers will eat whatever shit is shoveled at them by their service providers. MapQuest is looking for people who want to use MapQuest because they like what the company is doing. It’s an incredibly smart move that builds the sort of trust and loyalty larger companies can only wish they had.
