Vandalism of Google’s OpenStreetMap Project Maps

Unfortunately, even a great company like Google has some unpleasant partners who are ashamed of. Last week, the media flew a scandalous story with a Kenyan startup Mocality, which caught Google in unfair competition (namely, the division of Getting Kenyan Businesses Online ). Since November 2011, updates of the Mocality database were downloaded every night from Google’s IP addresses in India, and then GKBO representatives called customers on the phones from this database, offering their (competing) product. Google has made an official apology for "the people who are working on one of the Google projects," and the incident, like, was settled. However, today the story received an unexpected continuation.

From the same IP addresses that were involved in the Kenyan incident, vandalism was carried out in the open map service OpenStreetMap (a competitor of Google Maps): major roads were removed in the London, New York and other cities; etc.

The most obvious case of vandalism occurred last Thursday, after which the user account kane123 attracted the attention of the OpenStreetMap community (OSM). A complete analysis of the situation is not yet ready. According to preliminary data, over the last year more than 102,000 cases of access to OSM from at least 17 different accounts have been made from this IP address.

Probably, some unscrupulous contractor uses these IP addresses of Google, because it’s difficult to prevent such inappropriate behavior on the part of Google employees.