Why You Can not Always Trust Your Convenient Card App

For centuries, people relied on maps to find out where they were and where they were going. But digital maps of today – seemingly more accurate than ever – are not always as reliable as they appear.

At the end of August, for example, Snapchat users woke up early to find the internal map of the renowned New York app with the antisemitic label "Jewtropolis". In Washington DC, on August 25, Google Maps mistakenly renamed a Senate office building after the death of Senator John McCain a few days after his death. Researchers have found numerous lists of bad companies in Google Maps for plumbers and hotels. search results and reference juice traffic.

Digital maps are an ultra-convenient modern tool, able to locate sites of interest, shops and restaurants nearby, highlight traffic jams and direct you to destinations across the country. Google, Apple and various lesser-known companies are constantly updating these real-world representations with the help of various sophisticated tools, ranging from satellites in orbit to the phone by hand.

But there is another important element: the data provided by groups of people submitted by ordinary people, which allows the current maps to look more like Wikipedia than Rand McNally. When the Waze navigation app reports a road accident, for example, it's because the drivers down the road have reported it. Other unpaid volunteers submit information about new places of activity, landmarks and even new roads.

All this is a bet that the wisdom of the crowd ends up doing things well. But "eventually" can take a while, and in the meantime, annoying humans can still do things but they are good.

Take, for example, the morning of August 30, when Snapchat users discovered that New York City had been renamed in the map of the application. In addition to the "Jewtropolis" label, emblematic sites of the city bore new ugly names such as "Pedophile Bridge", "Zionist Cannibal Drive" and "Adolph Hitler Memorial Tunnel".

Snapchat and other apps such as The Weather Channel and Runkeeper are relying on a company called Mapbox for their maps. Mapbox Director Eric Gundersen said the company uses more than 130 data sources. One of them is an open-source project similar to Wikipedia called OpenStreetMap.

In early August, a user made over 80 antisemitic tag changes in a "tirade" in New York and elsewhere; The records of these changes show that the anonymous user also abusively renamed the streets of London and dubbed it "Commieland." The changes were canceled in OpenStreetMap less than two hours later by another contributor, other records show.

At Mapbox, however, antisemitic changes remained in a pipeline of card changes where they dragged for 20 days until human reviewers eliminated a backlog. While Gunderson said that an artificial intelligence tool Mapbox had reported the problem when he had appeared and quarantined the abusive changes, a reviewer then mistakenly forced one of the changes, overwriting the correct data.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation, a non-profit group based in Cambridge, England, said in a blog post that the changes had been reversed so quickly that no one had noticed them until Mapbox passed on Vandalized data from OpenStreetMap to thousands of applications and websites.

"The vast majority of editors want to unite to build something big, and these outnumber the few bad apples," the foundation said.

The king of digital mapping, Google Maps, does not rely as much on remote contributors as OpenStreetMap. But he can still undergo fraudulent changes.

Much of Google Maps data collection, such as satellite imagery or traffic information, is automated. But at the local level, some lists rely on labels suggested by the users themselves. These are vulnerable to attack and Google has been fighting this problem for many years.

On August 29, someone suggested that the Russell office building, in the Senate, be renamed "Senate Office Building, McCain" on Google Maps, bypassing a change that real senators were considering l & # 39; era. The change has overtaken Google's automated and human screens, although it has been canceled after drawing the attention of the press. (Renaming the conversation has since disappeared into the real world.)

In a statement to the Associated Press, Google said that over the years, the fraud had been reduced "to a very low incidence" and that "we are still working on new and better methods to combat this type of behavior ".

Sam Hind, a researcher at Siegen University in Germany, who studies navigation technologies, said map developers had realized that their users collectively have better local knowledge up-to-date than their own teams. can not collect.

"Of course, this comes with a problem, that you can count on the veracity of knowledge and that you can somehow check that," he said.

This is a problem for business listings on Google Maps. The company is facilitating the addition of new business listings to its map, in part to entice small business owners to advertise with Google to attract nearby customers.

This opens the door to abuse. Just ask Greg Psitos, a 33-year-old Queens florist in New York. In February, someone hijacked his Google Maps listing and changed his hours so that it was "closed" on Valentine's Day – which should have been one of his days the most busy of the year.

"Someone had been checking this list for four years and I did not know anything better," said Psitos, adding that it had taken months to recover.

Since then, he has been crusading to draw attention to the problem. In a waterfall, he deceived Google Maps into believing that his flower shop housed both the CNN news network and Trump Palace. These two lists were always present and viewable on Google Maps when this article was published.

"I'm a florist," said Psitos. "Now I am a scholar Google Maps."

In a study of the problem led by Google, Princeton's postdoctoral researcher, Danny Yuxing Huang, used data on hundreds of thousands of lists of companies identified as fraudulent by Google. A large number of them were for on-call contractors, such as locksmiths and plumbers, who created lists in different neighborhoods to create businesses. In one technique, fraudsters established multiple lists from a single address, then moved their map marks to new locations.

Detecting such problems is a challenge, said Huang, because it makes sense to let legitimate owners correct data problems due to poor mapping. "Personally, I think it's pretty hard to balance that," he said.

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