As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

Thanks for the clarification I can see that is indeed the problem that can occur. I was speculating around the idea that none of these disputes are solved until those who have grown up scanning the world on Google maps are in power. In which case it would be both populism and to some degree world view.

Google maps's districts in Dublin are all over the place. Looking around the city centre at a certain magnification I can see names nobody ever uses, or that refer to individual buildings or tiny areas, shown as if they describe entire areas of the city. Maryland, Hybreasal, Cathal Brugha Barracks - roughly where I'd expect to see signs for The Coombe, Kilmainham, and Harold's Cross. If I zoom out, labels for Kilmainham and Harold's Cross appear. If I zoom in, Cathal Brugha Barracks changes from the "district" font to the font identifying a single landmark, and moves a couple of blocks to where the building actually is.

This must be one of the hard problems for computers, though it doesn't seem like it should be.

> China is aware of this and they control any maps their citizens will ever see.

Everyone is aware of it. Maps have always been political. Maps and borders are political creations. Why is it that whenever a controversial topic comes up, people always bring up china? Every HN thread that has a controversial topic, someone always sneaks in a reference to china?

> "Of course all that ocean between Philippines and Vietnam belongs to China!" is what most Chinese citizens will assume, after all, they saw it on their maps growing up. While the rest of us will have seen a different map.

You act like there are two maps. One china is pushing and another everyone else agrees to. China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and every nation in ASEAN have their own maps.

The issue with maps has always existed. Whether it is current - crimea (russia/ukraine), sea of japan/east sea ( japan/korea ) or historical - hawaiians/inuit/nativesc vs european colonizers. Or the remnants of colonization like india/pakistan or artificial nations created by european colonizers in africa and the middle east which has created ethnic border issues.

Pretty much every nation today has map issues. Even within a nation there are map issues ( like the renaming of mount denali ).

Google does a lot of weird things with their maps, some of them aren't accidental. Here's my local anecdote:

I live in Thessaloniki, Macedonia (the region, not the country), Greece. In our city there's a bus station called "Bus Station Macedonia".

Funded in 1952, long before the name conflict became a thing, it was named that way because it was servicing the region of Macedonia in Greece (it's an intercity bus station).

Recently, I noticed that Google maps names it "Bus Station Thessaloniki". I live in this city for well over 20 years and I have never, not once heard it called this way. If you ask for the "Bus Station Thessaloniki" locals will ask you what do you mean. But Google returns "Thessaloniki" to the query "Macedonia".

And it's a recent thing. I don't want to get into the details of the naming conflict, but the fact is that our NATO allies want to usher Macedonia (FYROM, the country) into NATO really fast, despite their nationalist and expansionist government, because of Russia. That's a reasonable move and I fully support it.

The problem arises when instead of actually intermediating to find a solution to the name issue, they just use their tools (like Google Maps) as a propaganda machine with complete disregard to our interests or even the fabric of reality (It's simply not named like that. Period.).

Of course there are a lot more machine-learning based artifacts on Google maps than political ones (for example Fiskhorn-->Fishkorn is probably the result of assuming misspelled queries as the ground truth) but keep in mind they can use this power in numerous, much more malicious ways (ie downgrading or upgrading neighborhoods, reducing visibility of businesses that they don't like etc).

> (for example Fiskhorn-->Fishkorn is probably the result of assuming misspelled queries as the ground truth

The article literally explains that the mispelling is due to Google relying on a 20 year old document lying somewhere around the internet with misspelt names.