Give Apple maps a chance

Users of Apple's maps app have complained about incorrect maps and satellite views that just don't make sense.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• User complaints prompted Apple to apologize for its new maps app


• Janet Vertesi: I was delighted that Apple no longer relied on Google Maps


• She says Google's privacy policy aggregated users' personal data for profit


• Vertesi: Breaking the Google monopoly means that all of our choices can improve

Editor's note: Janet Vertesi teaches sociology of technology and human-computer interaction at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter: @cyberlyra.

(CNN) -- A recent torrent of complaints has prompted Apple CEO Tim Cook to issue a public apology for the company's new maps app in the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, which previously relied on Google Maps. Addresses are not showing up correctly, public transit directions aren't available, and the satellite views make it look as if the Brooklyn Bridge is bending into the Hudson River.

Unlike the naysayers, I was delighted to see the change. That's because six months ago, I broke up with Google.

It's not a decision I made lightly. I was in an intimate relationship with the company for years. Google knew what I watched on YouTube and which trains I caught into New York City for a night out. It facilitated collaborations with my colleagues and helped me navigate foreign cities. We had some good times together, Google and I.

Opinion: Why a naked Apple would be a better company

Janet Vertesi

But over time, our relationship changed. Ads started to show up based on keywords that I had typed into the search engine or in my e-mail. In Google search, things I was looking for were now buried beneath "helpful" suggestions of things I wasn't interested in in the slightest.

The problem was Google's latest privacy policy, which went into effect in March. Google's new rules mean that in addition to tracking your activities, it can aggregate your data across its many services and platforms such as Google Maps, Gmail, search, and Gchat, for starters.

Why does Google collect and aggregate your information? Because when Google has a better picture of who you are, what you like and what you do online, it becomes even more attractive to advertisers. While Google's ecosystem offers many appealing perks and conveniences, the price you pay is your personal data.

In short, when you use a Google service, you're not using a product -- you are the product.

So I took matters into my own hands, and broke up with Google.

Anyone coming out of a long-term relationship will tell you that breaking up is hard to do. You have to change your patterns. My first step was obviously to switch search engines. But to what? The old alternatives are all gone, absorbed by Google, Yahoo! and Bing. To make matters worse, I discovered that my own devices were working against me. Clicking a link on my computer or phone automatically opened Google Maps, search, or YouTube.

I had to find new ways. Juggling directions from Nokia, Bing and MapQuest has led me on several wild goose chases while trying to get from A to B. I also spread my activities across multiple servers. I deleted my YouTube account, set my search engine to Duck Duck Go (a service that doesn't track search information), and logged into AIM.

Deleting my Gmail account was the hardest -- and most revealing. It reminded me of the evil computer HAL 9000's death scene at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey." As I selected all the messages I have ever received and clicked the delete button, the system protested: Was I sure I wanted to do this? It reminded me of all our good times together by telling me we'd shared "38,496 conversations since 2008."

In defense of my stupidphone

The ad bar stopped showing ads and started displaying environmentally friendly statements. Did I know that "there is no limit to the number of times an aluminum can can be recycled"? Or that "empty tissue boxes can provide easy and handy storage for plastic grocery bags"? I felt pangs of guilt and regret. When the screen finally displayed, "You don't have any mail! Our servers are feeling unloved," I almost changed my mind.

That's when it hit me. I thought we had an intimate relationship, when in fact I was being manipulated into codependence. Service by service, Google had convinced me that I needed it for everything, all to seduce me into giving up more of my personal data.

Of course, Apple collects user information as well. But it is not the company's main source of revenue. Apple users pay for their products in dollars, not in personal information. Its closed system of products and devices, while decried among tech pundits, is its advantage.

Apple also has a long history of treating its users not like products, but like consumers. This incentivizes improvements that put the user first, giving us a more powerful voice. After all, we can vote with our dollars and with our downloads.

Breaking the Google monopoly means that all of our choices can improve. And that's why Apple's leaving Google Maps is a step in the right direction.

In the meanwhile, as long as I know where my information is going, I don't mind getting a little lost.

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Fox's laughable case for Romney

Fox's Bill O'Reilly brings on guests who deliver an alternate reality about Mitt Romney's weakened campaign, Howell Raines says.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Howell Raines: Fox News has been contorting to deliver good news for Romney's campaign


• He says commentators' spin attributes Obama gains to media distortion, voter ignorance, etc.


• Raines: Bill O'Reilly says evenhanded things for deniability if spin is wrong, Romney fails


• Raines: It will be interesting to see Fox spin if campaign should begin to reek of defeat

Editor's note: Howell Raines is an author and former executive editor of The New York Times. He is working on a novel set during the Civil War.

(CNN) -- Who says the media aren't interested in good news? Fox News has been broadcasting lots of it for Mitt Romney this week. Never have so many gray clouds had silver linings as those hovering over the hapless Republican candidate and his deflating campaign.

I bring you this report after having ventured into Bill O'Reilly's "No-Spin Zone," and believe me, his initial shout-out urging viewers to exercise "caution" before watching is fully, if unintentionally, appropriate. Apparently in Fox World, "no-spin" means "I am now going to share my news-based fantasies."

Howell Raines

The Wednesday broadcast featured Dick Morris, Karl Rove and Dennis Miller, an a-cappella chorus humming O'Reilly's favorite tunes: that the mainstream media is rooting for Obama; that the polls consistently misrepresent a race that is still a dead heat; that Romney will re-emerge from this autumnal swoon by winning the October 3 debate through his superior if often-invisible oratorical skills; that Romney is in decline simply because voters don't yet understand the necessity of top-end tax cuts, the sanctity of corporate profits and the horror of social welfare spending run amok.

Across its programs, the Fox News mantra is "there's still plenty of time." That's a truism, but chanting the obvious is not among the standard definitions of journalism. Institutionally, Fox is in denial about the state of the campaign. Romney is looking very weak very early. The attempt to avoid reporting this state of play in a "fair and balanced" way is producing comical results.

Stylistically, the O'Reilly quartet may be on to something new. We've had mainstream journalism, alternative journalism, conservative journalism. This appears to be vaudeville journalism. Wednesday, the verisimilitude of the performance was maintained by the illusion that of the four, only Miller is a stand-up comic.

Toobin: Why are candidates silent on Supreme Court?

Rove's role is nuttily professorial. He has adopted one of those erasable white slates popularized by the late Tim Russert. On it he scribbles integers with plus or minus signs. These, he alleges, are the amounts being added to President Barack Obama and/or subtracted from Romney by such daredevil organizations as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, CNN, Gallup and the co-opted poll-averagers at the website RealClearPolitics. Bottom line: This vast conspiracy is downgrading Romney three to nine points by using screens that overstate the votes of blacks, Latinos, Asians, women and the young.

Morris, who is beginning to bear a waxen resemblance to Orson Welles, explained, I think, that pollsters cheat by using false baseline figures from previous elections. Morris didn't have time to explicate fully how every news organization except Fox has signed up to help Obama by disseminating these cooked figures. Even so, O'Reilly thanked Morris for explaining polling mysteries he said he had not previously understood.

Opinion: Why Romney's rallies are a waste of time

The effect was somewhat spoiled by an unscripted guest from reality, Larry Sabato, the scholarly political scientist from the University of Virginia, who immediately dismissed Morris' rant as "grassy-knoll" statistics. He added that the poll averages on RealClearPolitics had things about right. Obama was ahead by about four points nationally. Of the big-three swing states, Sabato said, perhaps in order not to appear rude to his host, only Florida is still close.

The presence of Miller is apparently driven by commercial considerations. He and O'Reilly now have a lecture-circuit act that is selling out in such venues as Houston and Las Vegas. The closest I've heard Miller come to elegant public-policy analysis was to call Obama a "crap president" earlier this week. As a nod to factuality, O'Reilly does call Miller a "satirist" and, less plausibly, an NFL expert, due to his badly reviewed stint on Monday Night Football. In any event, it's hard to imagine anyone with a master's in public policy from Harvard, which O'Reilly has, consulting Miller on an important national election -- unless there's money in it.

Which brings us to the interesting case of O'Reilly himself. O'Reilly is no dummy, and he did work as a broadcast news professional before veering into infotainment with "Inside Edition" and the Fox gig. For all his pugnacity, these days O'Reilly has the look of a man doing beautiful pirouettes on increasingly thin ice. He's clearly angling to survive a Romney train wreck with some credible deniability by leaving the delusional commentary to Rove et al. and hinting at his suppressed misgivings about Romney's chances.

Opinion: For GOP, it's the social issues, stupid

He's not a man easily knocked off balance by contrary evidence. Thursday he opened with Fox's own poll, which presumably lacked the evils defined by Rove and Morris. It showed Obama's favorability up by 51% to Romney's 48%. It was, from a Foxian point of view, a nicer number than Obama's five point head-to-head lead, 48% to 43%.

Cannily, he drops in terms such as "in fairness to Obama," praises the president's campaigning skills and takes note of criticism of Romney by other conservatives. He hangs his hat on the observation that October 3 is Romney's last chance to get back in the race. This leaves him room to turn around if the polls -- we're talking the real ones here -- don't.

O'Reilly's newest hedge, unveiled with Fox's bleak new poll, is that the "likability" factor gives Obama an advantage with "uninformed, casual voters."

I think there's a secret behind O'Reilly's trademark smirk. Were it in his interest to say what's on his mind about the candidates' performance to date, he'd almost certainly admit that Obama has come on like a superstar candidate of the Reagan ilk, and so far Romney is one of the biggest duds in post-World War II presidential elections.

Right now, Fox News' general excuse for Romney is that he's not getting his "message" across. I'll tune in from time to time to see when the news from the real world arrives in the Fox studios. The message of Romney's tooth-and-fang financial-market capitalism is driving down the polls, and the messenger is coming across as an unlikable empty suit, even when he ditches his tie and jacket.

At a certain point, campaigns in early decline begin to reek of impending defeat. I can't wait to see how they spin that in the no-spin zone. Meanwhile, we can contemplate the dilemma of another O'Reilly regular, the Loneliest in the Public Opinion Trade, aka pollster Scott Rasmussen. He's telling O'Reilly the race is tied within the margin of error around 46% or 47%.

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Can Romney and Obama tell the truth -- and win?

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Frida Ghitis asks, Will voters support a presidential candidate who tells the truth?


• Ghitis: The answer is obvious; voters demand perfect odds and simple solutions


• She says Obama recently said he has to feign total certainty in his decisions


• Ghitis: True charisma and leadership require acknowledging uncertainties

Editor's note: Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review. A former CNN producer/correspondent, she is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television." Follow her on Twitter: @FridaGColumns

(CNN) -- Can presidential candidates talk to voters like adults? Will voters support a candidate who tells them the truth? The answer to that question is obvious to anyone who has observed American politics in recent years.

One day -- let us hope it comes soon -- voters will demand that their political leaders present them with a more realistic sense of the possibilities and choices they face. But for now, voters demand perfect odds and simple solutions, and politicians oblige.

President Obama confessed as much in a recent Vanity Fair profile, when he revealed he knows that each one of the decisions he makes as president could turn out wrong. "Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable," he said. "Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn't going to work." But the American public, the president suggested, cannot handle those odds. After you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it.

Despite knowing this, Obama did not project that supreme confidence and simplified arguments in Wednesday's debate. Romney did. That was not the president's only problem, but it was one of the reasons he didn't fare well.

The frustration showed after the debate, when Obama accused Romney of blatant lying in a debate that, like both campaigns, has been rife with distortions. Both candidates twisted the facts. Romney did it to better effect. It's a tragedy for American democracy that the tactic works.

Four years ago, Obama betrayed no doubts that he would succeed in achieving highly ambitious promises. It's harder to speak in dreamy, inspirational platitudes when you've been president for four years, when the prose of real life has not caught up with the poetry of the campaign.

The American political system demands charisma, leadership and boundless optimism, even if they are artificial and hollow.

Some voters tell pollsters that a "strong leader" is one of the most important traits they look for in a candidate. And pollsters track the perception obsessively. But the prevailing idea of what a strong leader is has become manufactured and artificial.

Candidates have to sound self-assured and authoritative, in a version of leadership that resembles more the utterances of Donald Trump in "The Apprentice" than the wisdom of the great politician-philosophers who founded the country.

Real charisma allows leaders to change their mind. But that's different from reshaping your supposed ideology to win different audiences.

Intellectual and political honesty are not Etch-a-Sketch tricks. Romney's penchant for telling one audience one thing and then taking it back when it doesn't suit another audience -- as he just did with his infamous "47%" comments by saying he was "completely wrong" -- does not count as mettle.

In the debate, Obama slipped in his efforts to don that leadership mantle. He even acknowledged that some of the choices are a matter of odds, that the country is a laboratory and we can only hope the experiments will turn out well.

On the economy, he said, "Look, we've tried this; we've tried both approaches," comparing the Bush approach with the Clinton years. Obama took a step toward honesty with the public in suggesting that we can make only an educated guess as to what strategy is likely to work. "In some ways," he said, "we've got some data on which approach is more likely to create jobs and opportunity for Americans."

Evidence, "data." That's not a modern American politician's way of framing a decision. Americans like it when their leaders (and their pundits) are completely sure of what they propose, totally convinced it will work.

Some people believe this is the inevitable way of politics. But it doesn't have to be.

In other countries facing great problems such as high unemployment and shrinking economies, these days, "difficult choices" and uncertain outcomes are the centerpiece of political discussions. Voters are treated as intelligent, responsible adults who have to decide what is the most promising of unpalatable options.

Friday's unemployment figures seemed to support Obama's belief in his economic approach. But they don't erase the uncertainty ahead. In the end, we have competing philosophies for facing a world where countless unexpected challenges are sure to emerge.

It's true. An appearance of self-assurance creates a reassuring aura of competence and charisma. It makes people feel better. People are drawn to those who seem most sure of their ideas. But being more certain does not make you more right.

True charisma and leadership require acknowledging the uncertainties, recognizing the gaps in our knowledge. In the view of presidential scholar Michael Beschloss, they require the courage to tell difficult truths, to make unpopular decisions, to work with people who have different beliefs.

Following the current definition, Romney proclaims with absolute conviction, as he did during Wednesday night's debate, that "the private market and individual responsibility always works best." And he promises to bring 12 million new jobs while guaranteeing without a hint of doubt that if he is not elected, life will get worse, prices will go up, incomes will come down, and American will become weaker.

Four years ago, Obama made promises that today sound just, well, sad.

After his 2008 win in the Iowa caucuses, he told his exhilarated supporters that he would put an end to years of partisan bitterness and pettiness in Washington. He would be the president who would bring "Democrats and Republicans together to get the job done."

As a candidate, Obama could draw a dreamy vision. He would bring red and blue states back together, close down the prison at Guantanamo, fight climate change and genocide. His election, he said, would "mark the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." He even vowed to "reboot America's image in the Muslim world."

Instead, he tackled much greater problems than he had expected even when he exaggerated his competence. The economy, the world, they all proved more complex than the black and white choices of the election. Unemployment is still high. He has made little headway on the environment. Republicans and Democrats remain at each other's throats, and people in Muslims countries are still not fond of America or its president.

In the first debate, candidates again avoided talking about the need to make difficult choices. The talk was of tax cuts, not tax ("revenue" is the euphemism) increases. There are other areas where the choices are difficult and unappealing in foreign and domestic policy.

Voters may feel placidly satisfied when the candidates avoid mentioning the dangers ahead or the hard truths. But beneath the wishful thinking, Americans know that the world is complicated, the economy is challenging, the choices difficult.

A candidate who tells voters he is 100% certain that the choices are clear and his plans will work out is lying, deluded or foolish.

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