Handy map app might not be telling the truth

For centuries, people have relied on maps to figure out where they are and where they’re going. But today’s digital maps — seemingly more precise than ever —aren’t always as dependable as they appear.

At the end of August, for instance, Snapchat users woke up early to find the app’s internal map had renamed New York City with the anti-Semitic label “Jewtropolis.” In Washington, D.C., Google Maps incorrectly renamed a Senate office building after the late Sen. John McCain a few days after his death on Aug. 25. Researchers have found numerous fake business listings in Google Maps for plumbers and hotels — apparent attempts to game search results and juice referral traffic.

And the problem is data submitted by ordinary people, which can make today’s maps more like Wikipedia than Rand McNally. When the navigation app Waze flags a highway accident, for instance, it’s because drivers farther down the road have reported it. Other unpaid volunteers submit information on new business locations, landmarks and even new roads.

Take, for instance, the morning of Aug. 30, when users of Snapchat found New York City hatefully rebranded in the app’s map.

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

There, a user made more than 80 anti-Semitic label changes in a “tirade” across New York and other places in early August. The changes were erased in OpenStreetMap less than two hours later by another contributor, other records show.

At Mapbox, however, the anti-Semitic changes languished for 20 days until human reviewers cleared a backlog. While Gundersen said that a Mapbox artificial-intelligence tool flagged the problem and quarantined the abusive changes, a reviewer then mistakenly pushed through one of the edits anyway.

The king of digital cartography, Google Maps, doesn’t rely on far-flung contributors to the same extent as OpenStreetMaps. But it can still suffer fraudulent edits.

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

But Google makes it easy to add new business listings to its map, in part to entice small-business owners to advertising with Google to attract customers.

That opens the door to abuse. Just ask Greg Psitos, a 33-year-old florist in Queens, New York. In February, someone hijacked his Google Maps listing and changed his hours to “closed” on Valentine’s Day — what should have been one of his busiest days of the year.

“Someone had controlled that listing for four years and I didn’t know any better,” Psitos said, adding that it took months to reclaim it.

Since then, he’s been on a crusade to draw attention to the problem. In one stunt, he fooled Google Maps into believing his flower shop is home to both news network CNN and Trump Palace. Both of these listings were still present and searchable on Google Maps when this article was published.

“I’m a florist,” Psitos said. “Now I’m a Google Maps savant.”