Hey, hey, what's up, what's up, what's up, Freedom Tech?
All right, this is take two
because I had the mic muted this whole time.
That's why I do audio checks,
but I gave everybody some time to jump into the stream.
We've got 17 people here now.
Welcome to Freedom Tech Weekend.
This is your weekly show where we go over one tool
that you can play with this weekend
to increase your privacy, increase your data sovereignty,
and let's find ways to slowly help you
take back some of your data,
get out of control of these apps that lock you in
to their systems and lock your data into their systems.
So now we should have audio.
Let me make sure, there we go, we've got audio, great.
Awesome, cool.
Today, now that we've got everybody here
and now that I've wasted some of your time
with my muted microphone, we are gonna jump in.
Today we're talking about maps.
This was a suggestion from one of our listeners
after last week's episode or two weeks ago maybe,
I don't remember which one,
but they posted online and said,
we should look at alternatives to maps.
So this is for you.
I do want to call out a boost that I got.
Boosts, if you don't know, are on Podcasting 2.0.
So this goes out live, we're streaming live with video,
but then we also do it where I archive it on YouTube
and I archive it on podcasts, on RSS feed for audio only.
And so I just wanted to call out, I got a couple of, a couple of boosts.
The first one, a boost is where somebody basically like pays a little bit of money and says,
I really like this episode and leaves a comment, right?
It's kind of like a super chat in YouTube.
So this one was for 2100 sats, which are small amounts of Bitcoin.
So 2100 bitcoins, if you will.
It says, if you're on the fence about chat GPT privacy concerns,
the recent court ruling should be the impetus to look elsewhere.
Marks does a good job explaining the current landscape and why we owe it to
ourselves to pursue a better way forward. That was from Wardomoth. Thank you for
the comment. Really appreciate it. And for the zap. And then the other one is
from Spencer. Good privacy focused information to be aware of. So thank you
both. I appreciate it. If people boost me on podcasting 2.0, a great app is
called Fountain. You can do it on there. You don't have to be a Bitcoin user. You
can do you can boost with just with credit card and stuff too. I am not doing
this show to make money. I actually run a company called Maple AI where we make
the most private cloud AI that you can find. It's like a private chat GPT.
That's that's one reason I do this because I want to share the freedom tech
knowledge and I also do it because I want to try and make people more aware of
privacy tools like Maple. So any boosts that come in I take those sats I take
those that money and I donate it back out to the community of Freedom Tech Builders because I want
to continue to help grow this community and support people that are building really cool things
excuse me if you do boost I'll read it on the episodes in the future okay so we are here to
talk about maps at first I wanted to do a quick update on last week's ChachiPT episode I don't
want to just spread bad information and so I want to correct something that that
we did on the previous episode and this came out later and that's why it wasn't
on there I gave you the best current information that I had but now that we
have more information I want to stay proper and current and that is chat GPT
does collect your data they have been ordered to retain user data however
there are enterprise customers and other users who are API users and their data
if they have a zero data retention policy signed then chat GPT has not been
ordered to retain their data so that's a correction off something I made now
something to note is that in order to be an enterprise customer it is you have to
pay monthly per user and there's a minimum and it's hard to find the
minimum, but some places have said it's like a minimum of 150 seats or employees that you have
to be paying for in order to qualify as an enterprise customer. And it could be upwards of $30 a month.
So, you know, 30 times 150, how much are you paying there? Let's do quick math on air. You're
paying like $4,500, $5,000 a month in order to be an enterprise user in order to be able to sign a
zero data retention policy or ZDR. The other way is to be an API user that has that special ZDR
privilege. That is an invite only or approval only I should say. You have to be approved and you have
to go through an application process in order to get that. It's not 100% clear what that process is
and what you need to be and how big you need to be and how much money you have to be committing
to spend on the API in order to get that.
So while I am issuing that correction,
I think for 99% of the users,
a majority of the users out there who use ChatGPT,
they're impacted by this court ruling
that is expecting and mandating that ChatGPT
retain user data beyond what was normally defined.
So just be aware of that.
Wanted to give you that update.
And also if you aren't aware,
there was a big breaking story yesterday from TechCrunch
Let me pull it up.
Let's start sharing the screen, shall we?
I'll quickly share this tech crunch thing.
I changed the size of my window and saw my buttons moved.
Here we go.
Share screen.
And let's go share my home server.
Let me pull it up first.
It was up and then it went down.
The whole internet went down yesterday.
Do you know what didn't go down?
Maple.
We got lucky there.
We dodged a bullet.
All right. Share screen. There we are. We are sharing. Look, I use Kogi for search.
TechCrunch, Meta AI privacy. This is not fully on topic, but let's just quickly bring it up.
Meta had a big privacy story break yesterday where they have their new app called Meta AI AI and people didn realize but when you chatting with the chat bot in Meta AI there a little button at the end that like hey share
this which is typical of any Facebook app right Facebook Instagram I think I don't know what's
happening what's on there very much but let's say Facebook Instagram they're always trying to get
you just like publicly post stuff and share it and it's it's like so ingrained in the flow of the
app that a lot of times you don't realize what you're doing you think that in order to like hit
submit that all you're doing is like submitting your thing but really what they're doing is having
you share it out to your public timeline and sorry they put that into their ai app so people are like
having these private conversations with ai talking about like medical problems and mental things that
they're dealing with and then they think they're just hitting submit to like continue the conversation
with the ai chat but really what they're doing is they're sharing it to their public facebook
timeline so people were like doxing and probably still are doxing their stuff themselves right
um and the things that they're chatting about so be aware of that always be aware of your privacy
try something out like Maple because your data is fully encrypted and we're not going to share
with anybody because we can't share with anybody because we can't see it. Whereas, you know,
these companies like ChatGPT, the big AI companies, Meta, they keep it all in plain text for themselves
because they want to use it for themselves. So that is my quick AI privacy update from
our last week's episode wanted to set the record straight. Okay, what are we up to now? Sweet,
we're up to 41 viewers. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Thank you for joining. Really appreciate you
coming on today. All right, I was going, oh yeah, I just want to really quickly change my overlay,
customize it into a circle because I like that so much better.
okay here we are so today we're talking about maps we use maps all the time this is like one
of the best features of a phone i don't know what what you think but being able to just navigate
anywhere in the world from my phone is amazing um so we're gonna we're gonna talk about like
you know obviously google maps apple maps some of these big ones um super useful but they're tracking
where you go they know exactly where you are all the time they know what you search for they know
where you're headed they start to learn your routines they can sell you ads they can share
your data um google especially has known data sharing agreements with governments and with
Department of Defense, that kind of stuff. So I still use it, but I also want to find alternatives.
And so I'm really grateful for the listener that suggested we look at privacy map alternatives.
So I came in here actually for today's episode this morning. It's been a very busy week because
if you don't know from April, we just launched two new models. We launched DeepSeek R1 70B and
Gemma 327b. So I actually just hopped in this morning to DeepSeek and said, all right, give me
the best privacy map options out there that are alternatives to Google Maps. And it alerted me to
not only OpenStreetMap, which I was already familiar with, but this other one called Organic
Maps, which is built on top of OpenStreetMap data. And I think that they're really cool.
So first we're going to say like, you know, short, short answer.
Give me a comparison of privacy for Google Maps, Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap.
Okay, let's let's just kind of go over this.
I also did a quick coggy search.
so here's what google tells you they're doing with your privacy for google maps how google
protects your privacy and keeps you in control right so um activity data allows for more helpful
products and services so right off the bat they're like you're in control of your data but
you should let us have your data because we make it so much more helpful to you across all of your
products and services right basically we want gmail we want google workspace we want everything else
you're doing google ads specifically to be aware of where you're going so that we can be more helpful
to you and show you a more catered experience yeah google doesn't sell your personal information we
do not sell your personal information anyone advertising makes it possible for us to offer
our products at no charge and it helps the sites and apps that partner with us fund their content
your personal information is not for sale we keep your data private at every point in the process
of showing you ads like how contradictory is that paragraph right there we don't sell your data we
don't sell your data by the way advertising makes it possible for us to offer these products for free
so while their lawyers tell them you can say you're not selling the data they are selling
your data right there's they're selling you ads so they are in essence doing that
and this goes back to the old adage that if you're not paying for the product then and if the product
is free then you are the product so they are offering it to you at no charge you are giving
them your data and you are beholden to advertising okay let's look at our response from deep seek
over here in Maple when comparing the aspects of Google Maps, Apple Maps, and OpenStreetMap.
Let's see, there's Google Maps, extensive collection of location and usage data, privacy
concerns, data may be shared with third parties for advertising purposes with tracking across
multiple services. Some settings are available for opt-out, but it's not very straightforward to opt-out.
Apple Maps, they also use location data, but they use anonymization techniques like differential
privacy, not tied to user identities.
They are more privacy focused, emphasizes user privacy with no sharing of data
with third parties for advertising Now that that I have noticed Apple Maps doesn do advertising in there because Apple has a different business model They want to sell you more devices and they want to sell
you their cloud services. So Apple's business model is to make you pay for stuff and when you're paying
for stuff you tend to not be giving up as much privacy. Opt out. Clear privacy settings reflect
in Apple's commitment to data protection. So Apple Maps looks like a better privacy option
than Google Maps because they have a different financial incentive and Apple has publicly
shown themselves to be more privacy focused. Last one, OpenStreetMap OSM data collection,
minimal if using it without logging in or contributing. Contributions may require an
email and editing history. So if you want to actually help update the maps, then you are going
to give a little bit of your privacy away, but if you're just using it, there's very minimal data
collection whatsoever. Privacy variability depends on the hosting app. Some third-party apps might
collect more data. So OpenStreetMaps just like provides the database of maps, but then other
apps can build on top of it, and each app has their own privacy, their own things that they collect.
Opt-out data collection is limited, especially when not contributing or using third-party apps.
And I think what that means here is there's an openstreetmap.org, right, like main website where you can just use the map.
Hosting is supported by Fastly, OSMF, corporate members and other partners.
So there's a foundation, the Open Street Map Foundation, OSMF.
This foundation was started and collects money, donations and funding in order to support the Open Street Map project.
something that can allow other tools to build off of.
So there's a lot here on the OpenStreetMap Foundation website, but I just want to make you aware,
like this is the foundation behind OpenStreetMaps, and then people can come, right?
They can use it themselves, this basic one on the website, or you can contribute to it, right?
So this is the about page here.
OpenStreetMap provides map data for thousands of websites, mobile apps, and hardware devices.
It's built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafes, railway stations, and much more all over the world.
So if you want to help build the privacy solution and maintain the privacy solution for the people around the world,
you can come use OpenStreetMap and consider updating and contributing to it, right?
It's community-driven, local knowledge.
OpenStreetMap emphasizes local knowledge contributors use aerial imagery, GPS devices,
and local tech, low tech field maps to verify that OSM is accurate and up to date.
Okay, a lot more information here that you can read up on and there's legal stuff about
their foundation that they have and the partners that they work with.
What I wanted to focus on and when I asked DeepSeek earlier today to help me out, it
pointed me to Organic Maps. So Organic Maps is one of these apps that is built
on top of OpenStreetMap and it is available on all these places. You can get
on the App Store, Google Play, right, these two kind of closed systems, but then
you can also get it on things like Obtainium, FDroid. I'm actually not
familiar with App Gallery and maybe this is a good topic for a future episode.
Let's compare the app stores and the different operating systems. Something
graphene OS. Zap.store is another one that's coming along. Zap.store is really interesting
because it's kind of like these other ones but a user uses a cryptographic key to sign their builds
and so you can know if you if you find out what that person's public key is then you can verify
that it's coming from them. Some of these other ones might do that too but okay so organic maps
is open source. That's always the first thing here on Freedom Tech Weekend that we look for.
Is it open source? Not every tool we share is open source. Let's just say open source. Freedom
Tech does not require something to be open source, but it certainly is super helpful and something we
look for. If it's not open source, they better have a really good reason for not being open source and
have other ways to verify so that we as users can verify that things are what they say they are.
Sometimes that means that you're running it offline and you can install like a little snitch or something to verify that data is not being sent back and not phoning home.
So open source is not a requirement, but this one is.
So organic maps on GitHub, they've got 11,000 stars.
So big project.
When was the last updated?
We always love to check this.
Two days ago and just kind of scanning down, you know, two days ago, three days ago, four months ago.
So it's an active project.
they have 467 contributors. Let's see here, just kind of scrolling through here. So what are some
of the features that they offer? Detailed offline maps with places that don't exist on other maps,
thanks to OpenStreetMap. So again, this is thanks to the contributions of everyday people, local
contributors, you can get more information that maybe Google wouldn't get because in order to
contribute to Google, you have to have a Google account. And so if you're going to share some
information, like you live in a neighborhood and you know that this street corner store or this
thing over here is really cool and is not correct on Google Maps, like do you want to have your
Google account tied with that because that ends up being a little bit of revealing of where you live.
Excuse me. So this gives you an alternative to that. What else does it offer? Cycling routes,
hiking trails, walking paths, contour lines, turn-by-turn walking, cycling, and car navigation
with voice guidance. You know, this is probably what most people use Google Maps for, right? You're
in a car driving, you're walking around a city, you're on a bike, and you want turn-by-turn
directions with audio so super important that that available and then offline offline is awesome so you can download organic maps download where you wanna go when you have internet connection
and then get out in the world
and explore without the internet.
In fact, I love how they phrase it here.
Organic maps is one of the few applications nowadays
that supports 100% of features
without an active internet connection.
Install organic maps, download maps,
Throw away your SIM card and go for a week long trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.
That's why we're here, chat.
We're here to use something like this.
So I have not used this yet.
I'm going to download it.
I'm actually going on a trip here in the next month or so.
And I am going to download this and give this a try on my trip.
And then I'm also going to start using it just for my everyday driving around and see how it stacks up against Google Maps and Apple Maps.
And I encourage all y'all to do the same.
Give it a try, download it, see how it works.
If you're going on a hike, download it and try it for your hike.
This is a great alternative to something like AllTrails, potentially.
I need to look and see what kind of trail information it has inside of it.
But it might be able to let you ditch that kind of an app,
which also is tracking your information.
You don't know who AllTrails is.
You don't know who the people are that work there.
why do you need to share your location data with them? It's got all sorts of
other things right like import and exporting things, dark mode, international
support, it's free and open source, respects your privacy, saves your battery,
no unexpected mobile data charges. That's kind of big too right if you're going
international and you don't have a big data plan on your SIM card you got like
an eSIM somewhere. Ooh idea for another future episode. International travel and
eSIMS and how you can buy those quickly and privately. Yeah so you know there's
there's a lot here no ads, no tracking, no day collection, no phoning home, no
annoying registration, no mandatory tutorials, no noisy email spam, no push
notifications, no crapware, no pesticides. They cross that out just joking. Purely
organic. I'm reading all these even though you're on the live stream
watching right now and you could read this for yourself but I'm reading them
for the audio as well later on when people listen to this and they run it back.
So that's that's organic maps.
So go ahead and try it out at the bottom of the page.
They have all sorts of ways to contribute and donate.
You can contribute by helping update map information.
You can contribute by participating in their GitHub project by submitting bugs,
testing out new features, submitting code itself, like doing a pull request.
Hey, you can use AI now to help you vibe code things and help out.
But don't submit garbage, please.
Like test your stuff before you do a pull request.
And then also like financial donations, they accept
and they accept all sorts of currencies, right? Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bitcoin.
So you can contribute how you want to.
All right.
They have TestFlight and Android beta stuff down at the bottom.
Linux desktop beta things and or not beta, but, you know, things on there, too.
So they've got a Telegram group, Telegram channel, Matrix.
They're using Matrix, which is another thing we should cover at some point in the future on this show.
They obviously have all the different socials that you can link to and go check them out.
So they really try to be an international project that gives you the most private maps that you can find in the world.
um it looks like they've reached three million installs as of december 2024 so congrats to them
that's that's cool all right we are gonna call it here we're we're almost at time and we've got 47
live people on the stream welcome everybody thanks for joining us today for freedom tech weekend
um i i mentioned just a second ago like oh that's something we should cover uh the the e-sim thing
I was traveling recently a few weeks ago internationally and I showed up and I forgot
that I had switched carriers, cell phone carriers, and my previous carrier I could just start using
my phone right when I got there. This one I had to, I forgot to add an international plan ahead of
time and they were closed because it was the weekend. This is a small carrier. I just whipped
out my phone. I was able to go buy an E-Syn. I paid to Bitcoin and it was delivered to my email
within two minutes I was standing at baggage claim waiting for my bag right
that the little belt hadn't started turning yet I'm just standing there
waiting for my bag and before the alarm went off and bags started coming down I
had an eSIM that I purchased with Bitcoin with an anonymous alias email
address and stuck it on my phone so that person didn't know who I was and and I
was up and running and I think converting the Bitcoin to US dollars it
was like four dollars and fifty cents or something it was really cheap and that
gave me enough data to last me for five days and by the time I was leaving to
head back home I still had a little bit of data left over had I run out of data
I would have just gone back and bought a bigger eSIM and so it was it was super
easy all right we've got one comment here before we close it out from modus
says I've used organic maps it's awesome the only feature I miss is traffic but I
I can always hop into browser and look up traffic if needed.
Okay, that's really important to know.
So it doesn't have live traffic.
I mean, I use that a ton when driving around.
So I will be on the lookout for that.
And then maybe I'll do a little bit of research
and see if there are ways that we could
find some kind of privacy solution for that,
that we could, I'm sure OpenStreetMap
would love to get that in there,
but that's cool to know.
Okay, great.
Well, thank you, everybody.
Thanks for joining Freedom Tech Weekend.
Play around with organic maps this weekend
or any of the other mapping solutions
that are built on top of OpenStreetMap.
Check the privacy, check if they're open source,
just make sure you know where your data is going
and who you're sharing it with.
And hope you have a great weekend.
Peace.