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These cupcakes are making me hangry:
In what is probably the only example ever of tiny, frosted cakes sparking mass outrage, strong negative feedback has prompted Google to remove a cupcake calorie counter from its iOS Maps app, the company confirmed Tuesday.
Google recently added the cutesy — and possibly half-baked — feature as an experiment. With the new feature, users saw a pink cupcake icon that automatically showed them how many calories they would burn if they walked to their destination. The app also translated that calorie count into mini cupcakes, telling walkers how many of the tiny treats they would burn if they walked from point A to point B.
But complaints soon started raining down like sprinkles.
Critics accused the cartoon cupcake counter of being patronizing, promoting body-shaming, and possibly triggering unhealthy behavior in people who have struggled with eating disorders or over-exercise, BBC reports. There's no way to turn the feature off, critics pointed out.
"Do they realize how extremely triggering something like this is for ppl who have had eating disorders? Not to mention just generally shamey," a user named Taylor Lorenz tweeted. She added: "Also it looks like there's no way to turn this feature off what the hell."
Google Maps has instead added 12 "worlds" for users to explore, including Venus, Pluto, Europa, Ganymede, Rhea, and Mimas. Google Maps users would in fact weigh less if they were on these bodies.
Also at The Verge, SFGate, TechCrunch, and Buzzfeed.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 18 2017, @08:33PM (4 children)
You know, it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way. Enough universal acceptance of everything. We ought to be doing more judging. Stupidity should be called out for the what it is. Hypocrisy must be called out for what it is. Sloth should be called out for what it is. People who are racists must be held accountable for that. People who are cowards, moral or otherwise, should be called what they are. Let's have a period of truth-telling, and stop pretending that everything is equally valid and fine and acceptable. It is not.
The only caveat is that it has to be equal opportunity. Everyone needs to cowboy up and turn that lens on themselves, too. We all need to get better as humans, and fast, or civilization will fall.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday October 18 2017, @10:01PM
NICELY SAID!!!
I give you AAALLLL my internet's for the next year!
High five! I've found MY moving buddy (he said in a deep masculine, non-bo-peep, non-lispy voice).
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:52PM (2 children)
But can we start by calling out the insanity of adding unremovable and totally irrelevant features to apps and forcing them on users?
I mean what the hell is a calorie counter even doing in a mapping application? Google Maps is not an exercise tracking utility, it's a navigation tool! This is something that ought to be in some "Labs" experimental features section if it exists at all. Not suddenly forced onto the entire userbase for no reason other than some management fuck thinking it was cute.
This kind of shit is why I don't use any Google services anymore...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 19 2017, @07:45PM (1 child)
I like the feature. It would help me better measure my caloric energy budget.
It would be better as an option you could switch off, but goodness is it worth all the rage?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 20 2017, @12:10AM
Yeah, some of the rage against it is pretty misguided as well...but I think it's about more than just the calorie count. I recall similar outrage back when I was on Facebook every single time they changed the interface. People don't tend to like having arbitrary changes forced upon them...
As for the actual utility of this feature...sounds like it's totally unconfigurable, so how accurate would it really be? Unless Google is getting way more creepy than I'm aware of, it's probably just the number of miles times the "average" calories per "average" mile walked by the "average" person. If you really care you could calculate that more accurately in your head. Looks like half your weight in pounds is pretty close to calories per mile:
https://www.verywell.com/walking-calories-burned-by-miles-3887154 [verywell.com]
...which is probably a better angle for criticism actually -- either you've gotta have Google asking for your weight just to try to get a goddamn map, or you've got Google giving false health information (even if it is just a calorie count) to a large portion of their users. If they want it to be remotely accurate, they need to get your weight at least. And if they don't want to piss off everyone who just wants a map, they need to make that question (and therefore the whole feature) optional.