You may have already heard of the google plus codes, or maybe you haven't discovered them yet. Today we are going to talk a little more about this fantastic global alternative to postal and open source addresses. With this project, Google intends to give addresses to those places or people who do not currently have an address, especially aimed at developing countries that need certain resources for geolocation and who will be the future users who will have access to the Internet.
The next billion Internet users belong to these developing countries and have no possibility of being located, therefore with the Google plus codes it could be possible to put a location to your homes or businesses. And this is not surprising, since according to some statistical studies by the World Bank, half of the world's urban population lives in streets without names or places without addresses. This fantastic project has been promoted by this study that Google has echoed.
Having no address, they cannot reasonably indicate where they live, and that can lead to affecting many areas of life that we consider normal in the first world. Because of that lack, the global open source project we are talking about today, so that all those parts of the world can have a specific location by getting these codes in an easy and free way with only 10 characters that will act as an address.
Plus codes are simple and easy to use, with those 10 characters composed of a code area of four characters (includes 100 × 100 kilometers), and a local code composed of four other characters (neighborhood and building, delimiting areas of 14 × 14 meters), a plus sign and two more characters (to specify more 3x3m) . They are based on latitude and longitude so they can focus any point on the planet based on a grid. And all through Google Maps ...
The truth is that I find it worrying to leave everything in the hands of a multinational like Google, which is also involved in massive espionage.
This is excellent, but in countries where personal security is a very delicate issue, if not the most important, the issue is that giving an accuracy like the one mentioned here to geolocate an address also brings with it the risk that unscrupulous people can attack or use such information to cause harm and worse still the death of people who use the code!
An alternative is that instead of being so exact, and as is done with postal addresses, the same code can be used but without giving the exactness of the location but an area or area, that is an option for those of us who live subjected to the risks of being one more statistic in the news of people who suffer from insecurity
I hope I have made myself understand