[talk-ph] Mass “import” of POIs from GMaps in the last few months: Should be we alarmed?

[Glen Scott]

Apart from the legality, Gmaps POI can be very inaccurate (i.e. no quality
control there...)

On Fri, 2 Jul 2021 at 09:58, Jherome Miguel <jheromemiguel at gmail.com> wrote:

> In light of the three latest major incidents of mass additions of POIs
> illegally copied from Google Maps (described as “undiscussed imports” by
> Tim), I think we need to be alarmed with such activity, especially since
> we’re still in the middle of a pandemic and travel outside home is hard.
>
> The modus operandi of the users I’ve found so far is generally add or edit
> 1 POI or street per changeset,  sometimes involving mass deletion of
> existing POIs mapped from local knowledge or survey and replacing them with
> the infringing ones. Other characteristics of the users I can recall are:
> - Accounts no more than a week or a month old
> - Refusal to cooperate or communicate through PM or changeset comments
>
> There are many reasons why these users engagement in this illegal
> activity, but what I’ve been thinking is generally lockdown fatigue,
> copycat of previous incidents, or an Internet challenge encouraging users
> to copy data *en masse* from GMaps to OSM.
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