Here’s the way I think of this stuff. Does it hurt more people to have it or not have it? In this case, sure, maybe the amount of people triggered by a cupcake icon on the map was rare, but is anyone hurt by its absence? If you want a calorie counter, there are million options, many of them free.
If you design around cupcakes being offensive and dangerous, you need to design around everything else being offensive and dangerous, or just continue with the boundaries of decency and common sense that have been in place for generations.
How about adding dog walking mapping to google? This sounds ok surely?
Let me rephrase that, just you dare to add dog walking to anything you Islamophobes, The sooner the West stop offending Islam with dog related imagery, tech, art, media, adverts and ownership by kafir in our neighbourhoods the better. Dogs are haram, why should we live in your countries and be bombarded with reminders of these unclean animals? Why shouldnt you consider our experiences and feelings about dogs?
I’m not one of the 30 million and I’m not triggered by cupcakes. But a constant nagging that I should exercise more would get real annoying, real fast. And nagging is what this is, the actual data provided (cupcakes burned) is pretty irrelevant to the decision to walk or drive.
And apparently there is no way to turn it off. I would bet that a lot of the complaints Google received were along these lines rather than preoccupied by eating disorders.
But you wouldn’t actually be upset by the dog-walking feature, and most likely, neither would most muslims. And if muslim communities were upset by it, I imagine their voice wouldn’t hit Google as loudly just due to proximity.
I mean, if your argument is that public companies can be influenced by the people who are loudest rather than, say, measures of the actual impact on people affected, and that’s bad, then, uh, welcome to Capitalism, I guess? That isn’t a new thing.
I was trying to think of a more substantive argument, but on the way there I was trying to think of counter-examples and thought of Google maps adding a feature where every notable location in the Qu’ran is tagged with a picture of Muhammed doing whatever thing he’s supposed to have done there. And, like, working through various versions of that scenario are all I can think about now.
Imagine that whenever you used Google Maps to find a bar or nightclub, it automatically added the local meeting places for Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m pretty sure Google would get an earful, and not just from people triggered by alcohol.
Most wouldn’t. But some are.
https://i.imgur.com/HuvlOSb.jpg
Someone cared enough to print thousands of copies of this out and distribute. Should their voice override others?
Well if this was in the Tech forum rather than the Liberal Stupidity thread I would agree that not turning it off is annoying, but as this is P&R we are looking at the reaction on socmedia and the consequences thereof.
There’s a lot of folks saying that group is just a hoax, or specifically designed to malign muslims.
There was no record of that group existing, at all, prior to March 2016 when those flyers showed up.
So really, muslims don’t ACTUALLY care about dogs.
To extend this digression way beyond it’s shelf life, you’d think that those people would be happy with a dog-walking feature in google maps, as long as they could somehow get to their neighborhood marked as “not recommended for dog walking”. If those signs were posted in the area, crowd-sourcing would probably take care if the rest.
At the end of the day, any company with public facing products has to decide what features to develop and support and which ones not to. Regardless of who is complaining or why, at some point, any feature that causes enough of a PR problem is going to be canned. All that matters is the visibility of the complaints.
LOL we do, there’s a whole shift to the taboos around dogs being out of control, especially amongst the wahabbi/deobandis (theres a fuckton of ridiculous cleansing rituals involved with dog spit) despite of what Mohammed actually said and did. Google taxi driver refusing guide dogs to see the impact on real people, and then google about Mohammeds Saluki’s/hunting dogs if you want to understand “Muslims dont actually care about dogs” is a statement that not even Muslims agree on.
heh, at what percentage of Muslim inhabitants in a neghbourhood are dogs and dog walking banned and this should be signposted by Google?
If you thought Cupcake Genocide was bad I dont think you want to open that can of worms. Which gets me to my original point. None of this is something you should plan product development around.
Nah, like I said, you crowd-source it. Users of dogs.google.com get a prompt “is this a good place to take dogs?” anytime they go to a store or public park or whatever. And every time the owner gives a dog the stink-eye, that person answers “no”, and it works itself out.
This search seems to bring up a million references to one case… some guy named Charles Bloch. I’m sure there may be a few others, but is this really a major thing where you are?
I’ve never encountered any of the muslims here in the US caring at all about dogs.
That’s because the US is an integrational culture, and face it, just how many devout Muslims (as in full on brush their teeth with a stick and what have you) do you know?
By the same token, even though they have customers and concerns around the world, Google is primarily an American company. So, it should be no surprise that they prioritize (even comparatively trivial) American concerns over ones that may predominate in other countries. I.e. even a small number of Americans with eating disorders may matter to them more than many hundreds of millions of dog-fearing people overseas.
I guess I just don’t see it as a slippery-slope to listening to every tiny piece of feedback. Some things are going to hit certain companies more loudly, and passion is one of those factors, but so are overall population affected and proximity.
This analogy is bad on so many levels:
- Cupcakes are not dogs; people do not keep cupcakes as pets. One tends to be much more important to people than the other.
- Google Maps is not a public space; different rules apply for private companies vs communities of people.
- Not every discussion need to be derailed into something or other about muslims.
Honestly, a surprising number given I’m in the middle of PA.
I mean, I consider them reasonably devout, in that you observe things like the women wearing headscarves, etc. They’re not brushing their teeth with sticks I don’t think, but who knows. We often get lunch from a halal place, because they have good chicken/lamb.
In my experience, religion is a similar part of these folks’ lives as it is for Christians. Meaning, it’s part of their lives, but it’s not some kind of singular defining aspect of their existence.
American Muslims tend to be pretty progressive relatively. For example I believe gay marriage has a higher percentage of support among American Muslims than it does the evangelical Christians who got Trump into office.
I sometimes wonder if the repeated claim that the is sometimes thrown at the left calling them ‘regressives who love sharia law’ or whatever (separate from any discussions about the actual accuracy) is having a weird effect where Muslims in those first world countries are taking more progressive stances like pro-gay-marriage, but I guess Evangelicals are a subset of Christians, and so are American Muslims.
This question got me thinking. In the US, the answer would almost always be “I have no idea.”
By which I mean that we just don’t tend to pry that deeply into other people’s religious habits. I have a bunch (“bunch” ~ four) of Mormon neighbors; I have no idea how many of them do or do not wear religious underwear. I know a slew of Catholics, but I have no idea how many of them employ the “rhythm method” of birth control as opposed to being on the pill. I know a handful of Jews and I guess I’d be surprised if they didn’t all wear mixed fabrics, but to be honest I have no idea.
That comes off to me as a deliberate misread of the intent of that page.