‘Digital Graffiti’ on Mapbox Highlights the Pitfalls of Open Data
- Rogue user edits affected Snap, New York Times and others
- The edits came from popular map-building startup Mapbox
Employees work inside the Mapbox Inc. headquarters in San Francisco, California, on March 5.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
For roughly an hour on Thursday morning, users of dozens of different map applications -- including Snapchat and the Weather Channel -- saw New York City labeled as “Jewtropolis.”
The problem stemmed from Mapbox Inc., an eight-year-old startup that consolidates geographic data from hundreds of different sources to help companies like Snap Inc., the Weather Channel and the New York Times build custom maps of their own. Late last year, Mapbox raised $164 million in funding in a round led by SoftBank Group Corp. The startup is seen as a significant piece of SoftBank’s efforts to develop navigation tools for self-driving cars.