Android urinates on Apple is one of the latest "jokes" made to attack the image of the American company, with Google stating that a user exploited the Map Maker system of Google Maps to make fun of Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),. Considering that we are talking about a very big problem for Google, this "joke" proving that the data from Google Maps can be largely erroneous, the American company closed Map Maker.
For those of you who don't know, Map Maker is the system that allowed you to send edits for Google Maps, it being mostly unverified by Google employees. Things change now, and then what Android peed on the Apple logo the Google company has decided that it is time to be more careful with what its users do with the important online systems used by hundreds of millions of people.
The decision of those from Google to supervise more carefully the way changes are made for Google Maps through Map Maker generated a very long waiting list for changes proposed by users, so Google decided to close the system. Below you have the complete motivation of the decision taken by Google, so that starting tomorrow the Map Maker system will no longer be accessible.
Hello Mappers,
As some of you already know, we have been experiencing escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months. The most recent incident was particularly troubling and unfortunate – a strong user in our community chose to go and create a large scale prank on the Map. As a consequence, we suspended auto-approval and user moderation across the globe, until we figured out ways to add more intelligent mechanisms to prevent such incidents.
All of our edits are currently going through a manual review process.
We have been analyzing the problem and have made several changes. However, it is becoming clear that fixing some of this is actually going to take longer than a few days. As you can imagine, turning automated and user moderation off has the direct implication of very large backlogs of edits requiring manual review. This in turn means your edits will take a long time to get published.
Given the current state of the system, we have come to the conclusion that it is not fair to any of our users to let them continue to spend time editing. Every edit you make is essentially going to a backlog that is growing very fast. We believe that it is more fair to only say that if we do not have the capacity to review edits at roughly the rate they come in, we have to take a break.
We have hence decided to temporarily disable editing across all countries starting Tuesday, May 12, 2015, until we have our moderation system back in action. This will be a temporary situation and one that we hope to come out of as soon as possible.
While this is a very difficult, short term decision, we think this will help us get to a better state faster. More importantly, we believe it is simply the right thing to do to all of you, our valued users who continue to edit with the hope that your changes might go live as fast as you've been used to.
Thanks,
Pavithra Kanakarajan on behalf of Google Map Maker team
