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Google's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map (medium.com)
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.'"
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.
Data is neither good nor bad, just unvalidated by check constraints. GIGO
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...
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Much better than “Simple error leads to neighborhood being inadvertently mislabeled on some maps”.
Rand and McNally must be rolling in their graves..
#DeleteChrome
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 about the issue and said it was no problem for him to update the map software. It was corrected by the pizza guy and Google maps updated in about a week.
If you are having issues with google maps then simply tip the pizza guy and have him take care of the problem.
Address problem? Fo'getbout it!
...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.
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 near that neighbourhood. Tough call.
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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This is Shitney Blowes we're talking about here. If you think their map-making is bad, wait'll you experience their logistics. Hint: They're the cretins behind eBay's Global Shipping Program.
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 of his house number on his wall out front from Google Street View pictures of his house.
Yet, time and time again, I kept getting rejections to this no-brainer correction. These rejections were not coming from Google, but rather from the "Google community". It appeared that Google has outsourced Google Maps corrections to the "Google community" which then in turn goes on to reject even the most obvious of corrections.
Many years ago, before Google became so dominant, my corrections to Google Maps would nearly always get approved. Google has fallen a long way in terms of accountability, both in Google Maps corrections and in general. It's a shame because it used to be so easy to make corrections.
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/parks and some of the more colloquial names that had been in use and actually remain in use.
The kind of funny thing is that there's a subset of neighborhood names that are well known and frequently used but are generally applied in ways that have nothing to do with official neighborhood geography. "Uptown" is a narrow official neighborhood, but gets used for an area that encompasses 2-3 additional official neighborhoods.
Some of the names are older names that predate the official neighborhood designations, some are official neighborhood designations that gained traction because the areas didn't have well-known names,. In one case, an official neighborhood name was an informal name that replaced a more formal neighborhood designation.
I think there will always be a disconnect between informal, well-known geographic names and official names. I doubt many cities were founded with a list of official neighborhood names, with the exception of some newer suburbs where planners imposed them or where formal associations exist that more strictly define them. In older cities, neighborhood names reflect the name of a village before it got incorporated or some kind of origin label -- "Joe's Corner" probably used to be owned by Joe.
Then you have ethnic designations that refer to areas that often are no longer associated with a specific ethnic group -- Little Italy, Chinatown, etc, but have also always been subsets of larger geographic areas with names.
I'm not sure neighborhood names mean anything at all, really, except to realtors and locals who need a convenient label when talking about some subset of the city informally.
We acquired a phone number at work to use as a direct like to account payable, we now know that it's the old phone number for a store that's been closed for years.The companies who show information on businesses still showed that the business was still around and using our current phone number, the way to have all those services remove a phone number or say that it is now closed is archaic and sometimes they require that the company that owns the store does the modification! i've spent hours doing such request and the phone number is now only on 2 pages of google searches instead of 10...
"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/...
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.
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 as a big data company, but it makes perfect sense that they have a giant database of map data.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"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 harmless" sounds shortsighted.