Google Contractor Caught Mucking Up Competing Open Street Maps
from the evil-vandalism dept
Late last week, a story broke about how a Google contractor was apparently scraping info from a Kenyan crowd-sourced phone directory, Mocality, and then calling businesses pretending that there was a joint Google-Mocality venture for which businesses had to pay. Google responded that it was "mortified" by these actions, and are investigating them. However, ReadWriteWeb, is now reporting that the very same contractor has now been called out for vandalizing Open Street Maps, the more open alternative to Google Maps that has been getting a lot more attention lately. It appears the vandalism was deliberate, doing things that are hard to spot -- like reversing the direction on one-way streets.Of course, Open Street Maps, like Wikipedia, is open to vandalism. That's just the nature of the game. But the fact that it was a Google contractor doing this looks especially bad, given the somewhat competitive nature of the products. As a company gets larger, there are certainly bad seeds who are going to get hired, but these two stories clearly make Google look pretty bad. It's so bad, it almost makes you wonder if that was the intention of whoever was doing it.
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Filed Under: open street maps, vandalism
Companies: google
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At the end of the day, there's always going to be stupid people in the world, sadly...
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It's possible that this is a result of someone trying to embarass Google, but setting up a fake company just to embarass Google seems like a whole lot of effort for relatively little return.
More than likely this is the result of someone being real stupid just to get a few more bucks.
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On the brght side...
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For the win...
I do believe they follow the 'do no evil' mantra. It's just that being this huge and having that much pressure from all sides sometimes leads to err and other ppl doing evil things.
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Re: On the brght side...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Geospatial_Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/List_of_geographic_information_systems_software
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Open Street Map vs Google Maps - Open Wins again!
It's a winner! Local road improvements are making a major change to my local area. Open Street map is pretty much up to date. Google is 2 years out of date!
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-A concerned search engine company.
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Life Support
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