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July 26, 2019 04:41 pm

Get Off My Lawn! Homeowners Ward Off Drivers Misled by GPS

People on the receiving end of addled smartphone navigation deal with the lost; 'Somebody backed into our mailboxes.' From a report: Everett Ogden's dream house was a three-bedroom at the end of a quiet dead-end road along a river in Jacksonville, Fla. It wasn't long after moving in about a year ago that the strangers started to pull up, sometimes eight a day. The driveway is narrow, so they often do U-turns on the lawn and sometimes run over the sprinklers. "Just yesterday," said Mr. Ogden, 42, "somebody backed into our mailboxes." Drivers have made news for relying too much on navigation apps like those from Alphabet's Google Maps and Apple's maps app. They've driven onto airport runways, through muddy fields, into lakes. Then there are the other victims of addled navigation, those living on the receiving end of ill-conceived directions the algorithms deal out. Mr. Ogden, who works in sales, spent time with Google Maps and cracked the issue: When people wanted to travel from town to streets in a nearby naval base, the mapping service routed them through Mr. Ogden's lot. He made a spreadsheet, and "there were 47 different streets that would point to our house." He reported them to Google and 20 were fixed, he said. Google said it is working to resolve Mr. Ogden's routes. [...] Google Maps and Apple Maps have support pages and app functions that let users submit edits to directions for review. Some users say corrections can take months to be approved, if they're accepted at all. Residents sometimes must take matters into their own hands.

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