Beyond privacy concerns about personal location data, major issues have come to light regarding the digital Maps we use and rely on everyday. Google Maps has a clear monopoly and is far ahead of competitors like Apple Maps; see “Google Maps Moat”. With that, significant price hikes to their API service have been introduced to much backlash. Companies such as Mapbox offer competing services to applications that need maps and geospatial data, such as Snap Maps, Streeteasy, Citibike and the current FOAM base Map. Mapbox, along with Apple, Uber, Lyft, HERE, Microsoft and Facebook utilize and build off of OpenStreetMap, an open source map much like Wikipedia. These companies integrate OSM into their busines

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the alternative to Google and other proprietary mapping data, as an open source and collaborative mapping project which is free to use and created by millions of participants around the world. As the crowdsourced and open map gets better and better, the value of licensing proprietary mapping data from Google plummets rapidly. But what OSM currently does not do, is make it easy to enforce agreed upon truths. Because of this, verifying data and keeping up to date with old data requires a set of committed validators and *vigilant protection from vandalism*. Currently, this is subsidized by the enterprise community that is built around OSM. However, what ends up happening is that private enterprises generated a “protected” version of OSM that is validated by a mix of human employees, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. Even so, this centralized version of the OSM data becomes proprietary and monetized, quite far from the founding OpenStreetMap ethos.

Vandalism on OSM came into the spotlight this September when an anti-Semitic alteration to the city of “New York” to “Jewtropolis” was made. This was edited and erased within 24 hours by the OSM community, however a snapshot of the vandalized data made it through the Mapbox review process and was pushed to the applications that reply on the Mapbox map, including FOAM’s base map: “a Mapbox artificial-intelligence tool flagged the problem when it showed up and quarantined the abusive changes, a reviewer then mistakenly pushed through one of the edits anyway, overwriting correct data.” Bloomberg writes: “just as Facebook and Twitter are struggling to keep foreign agents from using their services to manipulate public opinion, companies that make money from open-source products are facing their own struggle to protect their systems.”

“The OpenStreetMap Foundation, a not-for-profit group based in Cambridge, England, said in a blog post that the changes were reversed so quickly that no one noticed them until Mapbox served up the vandalized OpenStreetMap data to thousands of apps and websites.”