Woman shot dead by drug gang after following Waze app's directions to wrong destination

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Well you can’t blame guns… blame apps instead! It’s this year’s version of video games.

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Horrible tragedy for this couple. I can’t help but be reminded that the Olympics will be there next summer.

maybe the one sided economy that’s designed to keep the people of Brazil in abject poverty has something to do with it. We can blame the guns (it’s easy right?) but I suspect that even if you remove the guns the violence will not end until the underlying systemic problems are resolved

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Google maps tried to send me into trees at least twice. A couple years back it directed several thousand people down an abandoned railroad cut in New Castle, PA… the amazing part was that some people (not me!) actually did try to turn off the real road into the former railbed, which was densely forested with 3" diameter trees. The other time it tried to send me on a road in Wilmington, DE that hasn’t existed in over a hundred years, where there is now a 3’ diameter tree, which is readily visible in satellite view.

To Google’s credit, when I reported these errors they fixed them… eventually. I think it took about a year or so before they got around to fixing the one in Wilmington, which makes me think I was probably the only person who reported it.

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So… blame drugs then?

Full blame, of course, goes to the person who decided to shoot at a married couple trying to find their way to the beach.

Seems a little lame to tack this on to the end of an article that is clearly trying to sell us on “Waze app killed couple.”

“Drug gang kills woman who unintentionally drove through their turf” is a much more accurate headline, but then no one would be talking about it.

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I agree, and I know nothing about Brazilian gun laws. I was just trying to anticipate the reaction of American gun nuts.

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…and you cannot have a functionality that’d warn about the less safe areas, because that’d be “wrong” for some weird reasons.

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The article addressed that question.

A couple of years ago, we visited Orlando, FL. DH insisted on having an onboard navcomp in our rental car. One day, traffic forced us to overshoot our exit for the Disney complex. The navcomp directed us off the freeway and through increasingly dilapidated areas, until it announced proudly, “You are at your destination!” It had indeed gotten us to Disney World – at a back fence in a maintenance lot with no public access.

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Yes. A bunch of do-gooders inhibited sharing of biased but potentially useful (and sometimes potentially lifesaving) data.

What we need is adding to Waze support to third-party data sources, something like KML feeds for Google Earth. This absolves the app makers from any responsibility for the content, makes them immune to activist or legal pressures, and allows all sorts of other uses, regardless of who approves of them or not.

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Clearly, he needed to employ the Ben Carson Method for defeating assailants.

“Woman shot dead by drug gang after following map to wrong destination” doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? User error is user error. Waze did what she asked it to do.

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Likely user error results in people getting shot.

Remember when Apple ditched google maps in favour of their own thing, and it was regularly sending people to their potential deaths?

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What a hellhole…

Close; blame the war on drugs that makes it profitable.

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I’m not surprised. Waze is a pile of crap. I tried using it just last night to go to a meeting, because I knew I had to travel a good ways on congested highways. I had exact coordinates (that I knew were correct), but Waze tried to route me to a city hundreds of miles away. Other times it has instructed me to illegally cross a street where you can only make a right turn, then take 3 more rights, instead of just making a left at a controlled intersection. Add that to its cartoonish interface and pop-up ads, and I’d had enough - uninstalled.

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It’s not a perfect GPS solution, but if you want to know where the cops are sitting and waiting, there’s no real alternative.

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GPS routing is not infallible. We have all seen the stories of people driving into lakes and along railroad tracks and the like. Sanity check the route, people. Even if you can’t read maps there should be red flags (like being told to go the complete opposite direction from where you want to go).

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