Google's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map (medium.com) 76
Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, "and found that the app had changed the name of her community..."
It's just as well no one contacted Google, because Google wasn't the company that renamed the Fruit Belt to Medical Park. When residents investigated, they found the misnomer repeated on several major apps and websites including HERE, Bing, Uber, Zillow, Grubhub, TripAdvisor, and Redfin... Monica Stephens, a geographer at the University at Buffalo who studies digital maps and misinformation, immediately suspected the geographic clearinghouse Pitney Bowes. Founded in 1920 as a maker of postage meters -- the machines that stamp mail with proof it's been sent -- Pitney Bowes expanded into neighborhood data in 2016 when it bought the leading U.S. provider, Maponics. In its 15-year run, Maponics had supplied neighborhood data to companies from Airbnb to Twitter to the Houston Chronicle. And it had also just acquired a longtime competitor, Urban Mapping, which has previously supplied Facebook, Microsoft, MapQuest, Yahoo, and Apple. Though Pitney Bowes is far from a household name, the $3.4 billion data broker is "a huge company at this point," says Stephens, with enough influence to inadvertently rename a neighborhood across hundreds of sites...
In the early 2000s, Urban Mapping offered new college grads $15 to $25 per hour to comb local blogs, home listings, city plans, and brochures for possible neighborhood names and locations. Maponics, meanwhile, used nascent technologies such as computer vision and natural language processing to pull neighborhoods from images and blocks of text, one former executive with the company said... I visited the Buffalo Central Library to find the source of the error... Sure enough, one of the librarians located a single planning office map that used the "Medical Park" label. It was a 1999 report on poverty and housing conditions -- long since relegated to a dusty shelf stacked with old binders and file folders... Somehow, likely in the early 2000s, this map made its way into what is now the Pitney Bowes data set -- and from there, was hoovered into Google Maps and out onto the wider internet. Buffalo published another map in 2017, with the Fruit Belt clearly marked, and broadcast on the city's open data portal. For whatever reason, Pitney Bowes and its customers never picked that map up.
This is not the first time Google Maps has seemed to spontaneously rename a neighborhood. But for Fruit Belt the reporter's query eventually prompted corrections to the maps on Redfin, TripAdvisor, Zillow, Grubhub, and Google Maps. But the article argues that when it comes to how city names are represented online, "the process is too opaque to scrutinize in public. And that ambiguity foments a sense of powerlessness."
Pitney Bowes doesn't even have a method for submitting corrections. Yet, "In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Google defended its use of third-party neighborhood sources. 'Overall, this provides a comprehensive and up-to-date map,' the spokesperson said, 'but when we're made aware of errors, we work quickly to fix them.'"
In the early 2000s, Urban Mapping offered new college grads $15 to $25 per hour to comb local blogs, home listings, city plans, and brochures for possible neighborhood names and locations. Maponics, meanwhile, used nascent technologies such as computer vision and natural language processing to pull neighborhoods from images and blocks of text, one former executive with the company said... I visited the Buffalo Central Library to find the source of the error... Sure enough, one of the librarians located a single planning office map that used the "Medical Park" label. It was a 1999 report on poverty and housing conditions -- long since relegated to a dusty shelf stacked with old binders and file folders... Somehow, likely in the early 2000s, this map made its way into what is now the Pitney Bowes data set -- and from there, was hoovered into Google Maps and out onto the wider internet. Buffalo published another map in 2017, with the Fruit Belt clearly marked, and broadcast on the city's open data portal. For whatever reason, Pitney Bowes and its customers never picked that map up.
This is not the first time Google Maps has seemed to spontaneously rename a neighborhood. But for Fruit Belt the reporter's query eventually prompted corrections to the maps on Redfin, TripAdvisor, Zillow, Grubhub, and Google Maps. But the article argues that when it comes to how city names are represented online, "the process is too opaque to scrutinize in public. And that ambiguity foments a sense of powerlessness."
Pitney Bowes doesn't even have a method for submitting corrections. Yet, "In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Google defended its use of third-party neighborhood sources. 'Overall, this provides a comprehensive and up-to-date map,' the spokesperson said, 'but when we're made aware of errors, we work quickly to fix them.'"
This is going to happen more and more frequently (Score:3, Insightful)
Two third parties sharing information about a completely unrelated person, place or thing: no one vets the information, no one reviews the information after the fact, and no one can challenge the information.
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Fortunately, it doesn't matter because nobody really cares either. Google shows a town called "Apex" a couple miles from me but I've yet to hear a single human being use that name for the area. Let them label whatever they like, it merely serves as an occasional amusement to locals who discover the strange names.
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Around here, the entire city is "officially" broken up into named neighborhoods as part of some long-term city-driven program to distribute some small portion of city funds. It got started when some affluent neighborhoods began banding together in the early 70s to get more attention from the city. So they officially named/divided the city up into neighborhoods so they would have more equal opportunities to get funds/attention from the city.
The names they ended up using were a mishmash of school names/park
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"It's harmless" sounds shortsighted.
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"Founded in 1920 as a maker of postage meters -- the machines that stamp mail with proof it's been sent..."
What nonsense.
Postage meters are only evidence that the postage was paid for, and when.
Unless it's being used by the post office, there is no proof that it was ever mailed.
You can use the postage meter in your office to stamp something today... and send it next year. And since the post office is very lax about cancelling letters these days, nobody would be the wiser. In fact you could probably mail it twice.
It's Big Data (Score:1)
Data is neither good nor bad, just unvalidated by check constraints. GIGO
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I was going to post essentially the same, no such thing as bad data, just misinterpreted. Wouldn't a simple google search still find the neighborhood, even though the official maps overlay had changed? I bet it would.
And then there's the REAL point, 2 fucking instances total is a damn negligible error rate in mapping ANYTHING. So even if P-B didn't have a correction regime in place to handle it easily, BFD. It's an interesting niche issue, sure.
Mostly by way of relatively unnoticed companies controlli
Why blame Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hate for Google?
The article (and even the summary) go into detail about how it is NOT Google that is the source of the bad data...
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Google is the "known" brand that everyone uses. Nobody pays attention to the little players where they source their actual DATA from, along with other major players. That's the point I guess. Google caught the complaints because P-B had no way to be corrected and nobody knew they were the source of the issue, reading the story....
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The whole thing of neighborhood names is a bit foreign to me. Only in large established cities do they really exist, everywhere else an official neighborhood name is based upon the housing development that started it, and most residents don't know it. It's more convenient to tell others that you live by such-and-such park, or in the south west of some freeway, or near the intersection of A and B. If anyone said "I live in Fruit Belt" it would just cause head scratching.
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Buffalo is such a city. Most residents would know where the Fruit Belt is, or Allentown, or Black Rock, or the First Ward, or Parkside.
This mislabeling would surely be particularly galling to Fruit Belt residents. The hospitals have been expanding without providing any additional parking. The vast majority of employees commute by car from more affluent locales, and they're clogging the on-street parking that residents rely on. Calling the neighborhood “Medical Park” is adding insult to injury.
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Re: Why blame Google? (Score:1)
Here in Europe, Google seems to generally not react at all to reports, though sometimes 1-2 years later the issues sometimes get fixed.
Nowadays Openstreetmap seems to always have better data, often even when it comes to businesses (something Google used to be good at).
For cycling or walking they're just straight out useless.
It's rather depressing just how bad commercial map sources seem to be nowadays.
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To my knowledge, Waze and Open Street Maps are the only maps still maintained by local volunteers. This is why Waze is so much more responsive to problems.
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People actually use their shit products?
Only about 2/3 of the population of the planet.
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Sort of like Fidelity National Information Services, a company no one has heard of. Yet they've got their hands in everything financial and know everything about you regarding your money.
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Because writers are lazy and sensationalist and the creators of /. posts even worse.
From the summary this could have just as easily been titled any of the following:
"HERE's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map!"
"Bing's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map!"
"Uber's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map!"
"Zillow's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map!"
"Grubhub's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map!"
"TripAdvisor's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off th
Exciting headline (Score:3)
Much better than “Simple error leads to neighborhood being inadvertently mislabeled on some maps”.
Rand and McNally must be rolling in their graves..
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Yeah. I thought Arms Control Act was finally repealed and Google could exercise some real power.
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Much better than “Simple error leads to neighborhood being inadvertently mislabeled on some maps”.
Rand and McNally must be rolling in their graves..
Or Rod Serling. When he loses a neighborhood, it *really* gets lost.
Bad Data, Surprise! (Score:2, Funny)
I was dealing with bad address data for months. Google maps had lost my entire street and was showing a duplicate record for the adjacent street. Friends were being sent to an address about fifteen minutes away. I eventually reported a problem and watched for a response for months. Nothing!
After about six months of this I ordered a pizza. I know, it took me six months to order a pizza, he of course was sent to the wrong place. I gave him the cross street on the phone so he find the house.
I talked with him a
Re: Bad Data, Surprise! (Score:1)
Google said my neighborhood and the one next to us were connected. They were not and delivery drivers were always confused why they could not drive through. We reported it for years. It took eight before google fixed it. Their maps are worthless.
Fruit Belt or Medical Park? (Score:1)
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There are two issues.
1. Residents unhappy that their neighbourhood has been renamed on a map. This is something that needs fixing and appears to have already happened.
2. The second is gentrification, particularly the kind that happens when something like a medical campus opens near your neighbourhood. The neighborhood becomes attractive to others, rents rise, prices rise and artisan coffee shops open up. Yes, this can cause problems for long time residents, but the alternative is no economic development ne
I own property on a mislabelled street (Score:2)
...and went through paperwork hell to get basic services established. Even after I had water, electric, telephone and sewer, I couldn't get cable services because their mapping service didn't believe the address existed, and the effing USPTO still can't manage to deliver mail because they insist on filling the PO box with junk mail and cancel service when I don't empty the box frequently enough.
Google Maps corrections (Score:1)
I went to do work for a guy. He gave me his address but he warned me not to use GPS because it would take me to the wrong house. I was running late, so I used Google Maps with GPS. Just like this guy had warned me, Google Maps took me to the correct street but to an empty lot three blocks away from his house.
After I got home, I submitted a correction to Google Maps. I thought this would be a no-brainer correction for Google since I was able to point out the correct address for his guy, with even a photo
Many services are like that (Score:2)
Logical mistake (Score:2)
"The Fruit Belt is a residential neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. It is located adjacent to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Medical Campus was built in 2001, as as part of a planned "Strategic Investment Areas"... Which would explain a prominent label of "medical park" on a 1999 map, two years before then actual NAME of the development was announced.
Pitney Bowes (Score:2)
Though Pitney Bowes is far from a household name, the $3.4 billion data broker is "a huge company at this point," says Stephens, with enough influence to inadvertently rename a neighborhood across hundreds of sites...
The writer's, and possibly editor's if there is one, age is showing. In the 90's and early 2000's Pitney Bowes would advertise their home postal meters *heavily* on TV. If you're over a certain age, you've certainly at least *heard* of Pitney Bowes. Even more likely if you work in any kind of office environment, where you would probably have a Pitney Bowes postage printer somewhere. My office had one up until a few years ago, when they completely outsourced mail ads.
I don't think anyone would think of them