8 ms·

Porn Spam on Google Maps

172 points by edent 5y ago

AussieWog93 5y ago
To other people reading this, please note that the article contains an uncensored image of a man's (admittedly impressive) erect penis. For whatever reason, the author blurred out the penis in an image placed directly in the article's text, but not in an embedded tweet.
- abstractbarista 5y ago
  That is impressive!
  - amelius 5y ago
    Makes you wonder how he keeps his blood pressure stable when switching between "states" ...
- rootsudo 5y ago
  With all the spotty footage of the lochness monster, whose to say this actually, isn't, the loch ness mosnter finally discovered?
- DeusExMachina 5y ago
  > but not in an embedded tweet. Given it's an embedded tweet, I don't think there is an easy way to blur it.
  - geofft 5y ago
    Don't embed the tweet, which also prevents Twitter from tracking your users, and just copy-paste the text of the tweet and include a link for those who want to see?
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    The interesting thing is that opening the tweet on Twitter.com hides it under a warning, but embedded tweets don't have the warning banner...
- DoubleGlazing 5y ago
  Donald Where's Your Trousers?
high_byte 5y ago
naked and NOT afraid
yuchi 5y ago
Completely unrelated to the actual topic at hand, but this was the first use of the sarcastic question mark I found in the wild.
- meowster 5y ago
  This is the first I've heard of it. For others wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
throwaway47292 5y ago
there is incredible amount of porn in youtube as well, and in google images; i think it is really hard for them to moderate at this scale
- prepend 5y ago
  If only they had advanced skills in AI to detect patterns and images. Perhaps one day, Google’s algorithm will improve to not show me irrelevant ads and not show me nudie pics.
  - bottled_poe 5y ago
    Or better yet, billions of dollars.
  - throwaway47292 5y ago
    .. they have the word naked in their titles, its not like they are hiding haha i dont even think its AI problemm, you can probably detect half of it with dhash or something
  - Darmody 5y ago
    It costs money to scan all those images. Also those are public images so they are not a big deal to them. They'll instead spend that money scanning your private device.
    - prepend 5y ago
      Right. I think it’s a combination of their AI sucking and being a smoke and mirror show (ads are just mechanical Turk with buyers doing the labor of keyword matching and messy matches where they don’t care and provide no accountability) and not caring enough to spend resources.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Is there? I have found it to be very rare.
simias 5y ago
I assumed it would be about some porn company abusing Google maps for advertisement but it's really just some dude's exhibitionist fetish. I just looked and you can report images from Google Maps, I wonder if nobody bothered to flag these pictures or if Google didn't do anything about it.
victor106 5y ago
I moved to Apple Maps since the past 6 months or so. At first I thought I would be back to using google maps but I haven’t opened google maps even once. Apple did an amazing job so far with maps. Although once in a while I keep running into a minor bug with traffic updates so far it’s been much better than Google maps
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  Which part of the world do you live in? I am guessing it’s North America. Here in the UK, Apple maps is fine, but still a good few years behind Google. It’s things like footpaths and cycle lanes which are vastly more detailed on Google Maps, not to mention the actual data in Apple maps being a few years behind (a few of the roads in my area aren’t on Apple maps, and it has no building outlines. The satellite view is about 3 years old. I find the data on businesses is better on Google maps, too.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    It definitely varies, but I’d say that Apple Maps is on a constant upward trajectory of marginal improvements, while Google Maps and Waze rots. At best, it decays in place like Waze. At worst, they “improve” it, like Maps.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
    And if you have an openstreetmaps nut living near you, it's going to be much more detailed too, one near me updated the location of a rubbish bin within two days of it being moved.
- moooo99 5y ago
  Funnily enough, my experience is the exact opposite. I've been using Apple Maps exclusively during my vacation in the last two weeks and regardless of where I went, the experience was much worse than with Google maps. Restaurant info was not up to date, addresses were wrong and especially the routing was awful. Thanks to apples routing I easily spent a collective 4 hours more on the Autobahn than should have been necessary. Overall, I will definitely continue to use Google Maps as my main map app. My best guess is that since the iOS market share here in Germany is dramatically different than for example in the US, the quality of the user generated map content is dramatically different as well
flyinghamster 5y ago
That isn't the only problem. Scams also abound - try searching for a locksmith in your neighborhood. While they've cleaned that up considerably since the last time I checked, I can still find a "locksmith" entry in my area located in a vacant storefront.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  How is this a scam? It sounds more like a case of using outdated business listings.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Even if the business is legitimate, you can usually just pin it wherever you want on Google maps so it shows in your local search.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Scammers will set up fake businesses everywhere with the phone numbers all routing back to the same boiler room from where they’ll dispatch some low-quality contractor who’ll do a bad job and overcharge you for it. Wikipedia has an article for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam A comment below suggests this isn't limited to locksmiths and other trades are affected too.
    - Ansil849 5y ago
      Oh wow, had no idea about this.
      - ljf 5y ago
        I had similar trying to get quotes for a plumber to fit a boiler in London. After phoning the first person in the Yellow Pages and booking an appointment for them to come and quote, I moved down the list. 8 of the first 10 I called admitted to just being the same company, using different names - they obvs only wanted to book in to quote once! When they came they were lovely but there quote was very low and also low on detail for what they'd do. I found someone local in the end. Old school spam!
thrdbndndn 5y ago
>"User Generated Content is great, innit? As a company, I want users to submit photos, so I don't have to do any content curation. Moderation? Nah mate, stick some AI on there to filter out anything offensive and we're golden." >"Anyway, I reported it - yay for doing unpaid labour for a megacorporation " I don't get this sarcastic tone. User-generated content on Google Maps is pretty solid after all these years. One or two bad apples don't diminish it. And no, I don't think Google have the manpower, nor should they waste theirs, to "curate" or "mod" the content proactively other than dealing with reports. The author probably has a point for things like YouTube comments since the SNR is so damn low, but GMaps? Really?
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  > User-generated content on Google Maps is pretty solid after all these years. In Germany, there are lots of scammers registering domains for businesses that have no Google Page, and owners of restaurants are literally extorted with those practices. For example, lieferando/takeaway claims business pages with custom domains in an automated process to force restaurants into using their platform, they literally own thousands of domains like "restaurant-name-in-city.de". Additionally the phone number is routed through their VoIP gateway, and it's published everywhere like this. So if people try to call the restaurant, they call through their hotline, which gives them even more power to put pressure on restaurant owners to pay premium. I'm sorry, but this yelp style mafia shit that this solution allowed is not what I can support in good faith.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    Sounds like textbook trademark infringement.
    - qayxc 5y ago
      How so? Trademarks have to be registered in order to be protected and even then you have to actively pursue potential violations (i.e. "defend it"), lest you lose it anyway. You really think that your average family restaurant or mom-and-pop store that does offers delivery on the side can afford that? Besides, in my region there's at least 4 restaurants and hotels named "Black Eagle" in a 10 km radius. You could never protect that name for various reasons.
etothepii 5y ago
36m views. How much would I have paid for that many impressions through Google Ads?
Ansil849 5y ago
This reminds me of individuals who include nude photos of themselves reflected in items they post on ebay. When people spot them, they assume that it is accidental, but they are uploaded intentionally by exhibitionists, like in this Google Maps case.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Aliexpress amateur porn was kinda decent until it was taken over by onlyfans spam.
  - zibzab 5y ago
    Wait, what? Aliexpress amateur portrait is a thing now? When did that happen?
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      Try looking at reviews of sexy stockings and other 'hot' stuff, and you'll see many review photos of girls wearing only those, and usually with links to onlyfans. Sometimes it happened even with "normal" stuff.. i remember a photo of a naked girl with a stick of ram (reviewed item) as her only "clothing".
      - rootsudo 5y ago
        Still a thing on new marketplaces in SEA, and best of all, they don't censor the address on the packing label or their phone number. Sad when you can be quite creative on shoppe and such... but yes.
      - NullPrefix 5y ago
        >girls wearing only those It's not just girls. No way to forget the image of that old geezer in fishnet with everything hanging out.
waschl 5y ago
Once I discovered a (for me) new feature in the iOS Google Maps app, showing recently uploaded videos and images for places in my vicinity. I was randomly browsing through it until I found a video of a woman on a car‘s passenger seat trying to pee out of the side window. Wasn’t expecting her to succeed… Anyhow, reported it and went on, but couldn’t find it later when I wanted to show to friends.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Maps is spam spelled backwards, and is almost scam spelled backwards.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Map cam sac spam scamps maps camp.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  And "Google" is just "Go ogle" without the space. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9b4315d7-4a89-4bdb-8e78-cdbb273ac2e7 https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9b4315d7-4a89-4bdb-8e78-cdbb273...
- ri0t 5y ago
  You know what scam is spelled backwards... ;)
  - ilammy 5y ago
    “Exactly. And not in your hands. And who makes M&M's?”
bluedino 5y ago
Young kids (10-11 years old) in my area seem to uploading selfies to Yelp for certain restaurants, as pictures of the food or the building. I've reported it and they don't take them down.
hxii 5y ago
It's incredibly annoying that this kind of thing is rampant, while my changes to places that are mislabeled or closed get declined.
- cush 5y ago
  In the scheme of things, maybe changes to places are far more important. If someone messes with the hours of operation of a store, they're directly affecting someone's livelihood. Naked man hiding on the far side of a panorama, not so much.
- the_biot 5y ago
  Consider making your changes in OpenStreetmaps. It's super easy to do in a mobile app, and the maps are great.
  - moksly 5y ago
    This is a little unrelated but it’s a funny anecdote about submitting changes to OpenStreetmaps. A few years back we build an open source app to handle employee tax deductions and pay for work related driving together with a few other municipalities. Part of how it works relies on a local company to download data from OSM and feed it to us in an address to address routing api, but at one point we changed the driving direction on a rather important (very busy might be the right English?) street to become one-way. OSM got the direction wrong, so that it was suddenly impossible to reach the municipality of our second largest city. This was “fun” with tens of thousand of employees sending in issues, and I set out to fix it. So with our official municipality account (and not bothering to read the rules) I used Google maps as part of the evidence. I also included a photo I had taken from the street myself. Anyway, because you’re not allowed to reference Google maps I got our account banned and the change reversed so that OSM was wrong again, and it took me 3 days of arguing with the “amateur” contributors to get them to realise that I worked in the organisation who decided which way the direction of the street goes.
    - pwg 5y ago
      > I used Google maps as part of the evidence. This was the cause. OpenStreetMap has a very strict zero-tolerance policy of anything that might be sourced from a copywritten source. Maps were traditionally "big business" before OpenStreetMap, and map data was closely guarded (and the guards had no worries about attacking what they believed to be even the slightest infringements of their copyrights). > I also included a photo I had taken from the street myself. If you had used just the photo you took yourself, and not referenced Google at all, you'd have had no issue getting the fix made and having it stick.
q-rews 5y ago
Who cares about porn spam (ahem) when most of the photos on Google Maps are uploaded by clueless people? Google Maps made it too easy for people to tap “ok” and take every photo they took nearby and upload them in one swoop. Selfies, dogs, sunset photos. Sir this is a Wendy’s. At first I wonder how could people be so ridiculous by uploading all of these random photos and then I noticed this pattern in the app. I can’t find it anymore now though so maybe they dropped it, the photos are no longer autoselected in group. As a business owner basically I have to report 80% of the photos people upload.
- faebi 5y ago
  Same, I am an extensive google maps user and I see so many (home) family and kids pictures in any random place. The UI is not clear on what happens. Even I did it once nearly accidentally. At the same time, there are some funny ones in between. One person uploaded Caribbean beach pictures to the local public pool.
  - rapnie 5y ago
    Maybe the whole images thing is yet another way for google to train their AI's.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Most of that is charming and at worst just useless. Can't say that about a guy doinf exhibitionism.
notacoward 5y ago
Seems like after about the twentieth time Google could at least block someone from making changes, but apparently that's not considered a technical problem so nobody's interested.
- NilsIRL 5y ago
  From what I can tell, the individual(s?) use(s) different accounts for each uploaded picture.
legrande 5y ago
Spotify is full of 'user generated content' in the form of public playlists. Some people don't bother to set their playlists to private and we get to witness some people's bad taste (or good taste!) in music. Most people don't even use pseudonyms on Spotify and you can just search for their full legal name and see what music they like. It's an interesting heuristic to look at if you're playing the dating game too; 'Does this person like the same music as me? Let's find out!'
- zinekeller 5y ago
  Uhm, Venmo. Well, recently there are some changes to Venmo, but on its original form "social media for money"? Like, in other countries that would be a lawsuit (or more likely a government intervention). Apart from Venmo, I haven't heard or used a money-transfer (or equivalent) app that just shows your trail of payments publicly. In some countries, an equivalent system is either operated by a consortium of banks (a la Netherlands' iDEAL or Canada's Interac) or controlled by the central bank.
- dvtrn 5y ago
  I think I’m missing the comparison (probably because I’m still trying to wake up and get my brain through the boot process)
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    Google Maps uses contribution from users to the point that something like the current topic happens. Spotify and Venmo on the other hand (by default) does the opposite: most users expected privacy but, uhm, they tried to be "Facebook, but for x" in an area where everyone (or at least most of their users) wants privacy and you get news reports of what public officials are listening to or spent.
    - dvtrn 5y ago
      Aha okay. Thank you for that, it really wasn’t clicking for a solid moment there. I agree re:Venmo and turned the sharing function off the moment I saw there was a livestream of what my friends were paying for. Always got a bit of a chuckle learning some of the code words people use for..things they’re paying for.
yen3k 5y ago
By judging from the images in the blog post these are basically just photos of a naked man. How does that classify as porn?
- macksd 5y ago
  This comment is an impressive level of missing-the-point pedantry even for Hacker News.
gmoore 5y ago
a naked guy on maps - sheesh - what's the big deal.
Lapsa 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXzFT7GEivo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXzFT7GEivo
fosshogg 5y ago
This is hilarious
skinkestek 5y ago
Google is amusing in many ways. I have some photos shared that I took in a restaurant if not at the end of the world then in a related place, far far away from Italy. The name of the restaurant however contains something that people will often search for in connection with Italy. That picture from a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere has maybe a hundred times more views than any of my other images from way more interesting places. Only reason I can see is it somehow has been mixed in when people searched for that search term, because the number of views on that single image is far more than the number of people in that area and probably more than that plus all tourists that have been there since 15 years ago ;-)

172 points by edent 5y ago

To other people reading this, please note that the article contains an uncensored image of a man's (admittedly impressive) erect penis. For whatever reason, the author blurred out the penis in an image placed directly in the article's text, but not in an embedded tweet.

abstractbarista 5y ago
That is impressive!
- amelius 5y ago
  Makes you wonder how he keeps his blood pressure stable when switching between "states" ...
rootsudo 5y ago
With all the spotty footage of the lochness monster, whose to say this actually, isn't, the loch ness mosnter finally discovered?
DeusExMachina 5y ago
> but not in an embedded tweet. Given it's an embedded tweet, I don't think there is an easy way to blur it.
- geofft 5y ago
  Don't embed the tweet, which also prevents Twitter from tracking your users, and just copy-paste the text of the tweet and include a link for those who want to see?
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  The interesting thing is that opening the tweet on Twitter.com hides it under a warning, but embedded tweets don't have the warning banner...
DoubleGlazing 5y ago
Donald Where's Your Trousers?

high_byte 5y ago

naked and NOT afraid

yuchi 5y ago

Completely unrelated to the actual topic at hand, but this was the first use of the sarcastic question mark I found in the wild.

meowster 5y ago
This is the first I've heard of it. For others wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

throwaway47292 5y ago

there is incredible amount of porn in youtube as well, and in google images; i think it is really hard for them to moderate at this scale

prepend 5y ago
If only they had advanced skills in AI to detect patterns and images. Perhaps one day, Google’s algorithm will improve to not show me irrelevant ads and not show me nudie pics.
- bottled_poe 5y ago
  Or better yet, billions of dollars.
- throwaway47292 5y ago
  .. they have the word naked in their titles, its not like they are hiding haha i dont even think its AI problemm, you can probably detect half of it with dhash or something
- Darmody 5y ago
  It costs money to scan all those images. Also those are public images so they are not a big deal to them. They'll instead spend that money scanning your private device.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Right. I think it’s a combination of their AI sucking and being a smoke and mirror show (ads are just mechanical Turk with buyers doing the labor of keyword matching and messy matches where they don’t care and provide no accountability) and not caring enough to spend resources.
emodendroket 5y ago
Is there? I have found it to be very rare.

simias 5y ago

I assumed it would be about some porn company abusing Google maps for advertisement but it's really just some dude's exhibitionist fetish. I just looked and you can report images from Google Maps, I wonder if nobody bothered to flag these pictures or if Google didn't do anything about it.

victor106 5y ago

I moved to Apple Maps since the past 6 months or so. At first I thought I would be back to using google maps but I haven’t opened google maps even once. Apple did an amazing job so far with maps. Although once in a while I keep running into a minor bug with traffic updates so far it’s been much better than Google maps

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
Which part of the world do you live in? I am guessing it’s North America. Here in the UK, Apple maps is fine, but still a good few years behind Google. It’s things like footpaths and cycle lanes which are vastly more detailed on Google Maps, not to mention the actual data in Apple maps being a few years behind (a few of the roads in my area aren’t on Apple maps, and it has no building outlines. The satellite view is about 3 years old. I find the data on businesses is better on Google maps, too.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  It definitely varies, but I’d say that Apple Maps is on a constant upward trajectory of marginal improvements, while Google Maps and Waze rots. At best, it decays in place like Waze. At worst, they “improve” it, like Maps.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  And if you have an openstreetmaps nut living near you, it's going to be much more detailed too, one near me updated the location of a rubbish bin within two days of it being moved.
moooo99 5y ago
Funnily enough, my experience is the exact opposite. I've been using Apple Maps exclusively during my vacation in the last two weeks and regardless of where I went, the experience was much worse than with Google maps. Restaurant info was not up to date, addresses were wrong and especially the routing was awful. Thanks to apples routing I easily spent a collective 4 hours more on the Autobahn than should have been necessary. Overall, I will definitely continue to use Google Maps as my main map app. My best guess is that since the iOS market share here in Germany is dramatically different than for example in the US, the quality of the user generated map content is dramatically different as well

flyinghamster 5y ago

That isn't the only problem. Scams also abound - try searching for a locksmith in your neighborhood. While they've cleaned that up considerably since the last time I checked, I can still find a "locksmith" entry in my area located in a vacant storefront.

Ansil849 5y ago
How is this a scam? It sounds more like a case of using outdated business listings.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Even if the business is legitimate, you can usually just pin it wherever you want on Google maps so it shows in your local search.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Scammers will set up fake businesses everywhere with the phone numbers all routing back to the same boiler room from where they’ll dispatch some low-quality contractor who’ll do a bad job and overcharge you for it. Wikipedia has an article for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam A comment below suggests this isn't limited to locksmiths and other trades are affected too.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    Oh wow, had no idea about this.
    - ljf 5y ago
      I had similar trying to get quotes for a plumber to fit a boiler in London. After phoning the first person in the Yellow Pages and booking an appointment for them to come and quote, I moved down the list. 8 of the first 10 I called admitted to just being the same company, using different names - they obvs only wanted to book in to quote once! When they came they were lovely but there quote was very low and also low on detail for what they'd do. I found someone local in the end. Old school spam!

thrdbndndn 5y ago

>"User Generated Content is great, innit? As a company, I want users to submit photos, so I don't have to do any content curation. Moderation? Nah mate, stick some AI on there to filter out anything offensive and we're golden." >"Anyway, I reported it - yay for doing unpaid labour for a megacorporation " I don't get this sarcastic tone. User-generated content on Google Maps is pretty solid after all these years. One or two bad apples don't diminish it. And no, I don't think Google have the manpower, nor should they waste theirs, to "curate" or "mod" the content proactively other than dealing with reports. The author probably has a point for things like YouTube comments since the SNR is so damn low, but GMaps? Really?

cookiengineer 5y ago
> User-generated content on Google Maps is pretty solid after all these years. In Germany, there are lots of scammers registering domains for businesses that have no Google Page, and owners of restaurants are literally extorted with those practices. For example, lieferando/takeaway claims business pages with custom domains in an automated process to force restaurants into using their platform, they literally own thousands of domains like "restaurant-name-in-city.de". Additionally the phone number is routed through their VoIP gateway, and it's published everywhere like this. So if people try to call the restaurant, they call through their hotline, which gives them even more power to put pressure on restaurant owners to pay premium. I'm sorry, but this yelp style mafia shit that this solution allowed is not what I can support in good faith.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  Sounds like textbook trademark infringement.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    How so? Trademarks have to be registered in order to be protected and even then you have to actively pursue potential violations (i.e. "defend it"), lest you lose it anyway. You really think that your average family restaurant or mom-and-pop store that does offers delivery on the side can afford that? Besides, in my region there's at least 4 restaurants and hotels named "Black Eagle" in a 10 km radius. You could never protect that name for various reasons.

etothepii 5y ago

36m views. How much would I have paid for that many impressions through Google Ads?

Ansil849 5y ago

This reminds me of individuals who include nude photos of themselves reflected in items they post on ebay. When people spot them, they assume that it is accidental, but they are uploaded intentionally by exhibitionists, like in this Google Maps case.

NullPrefix 5y ago
Aliexpress amateur porn was kinda decent until it was taken over by onlyfans spam.
- zibzab 5y ago
  Wait, what? Aliexpress amateur portrait is a thing now? When did that happen?
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Try looking at reviews of sexy stockings and other 'hot' stuff, and you'll see many review photos of girls wearing only those, and usually with links to onlyfans. Sometimes it happened even with "normal" stuff.. i remember a photo of a naked girl with a stick of ram (reviewed item) as her only "clothing".
    - rootsudo 5y ago
      Still a thing on new marketplaces in SEA, and best of all, they don't censor the address on the packing label or their phone number. Sad when you can be quite creative on shoppe and such... but yes.
    - NullPrefix 5y ago
      >girls wearing only those It's not just girls. No way to forget the image of that old geezer in fishnet with everything hanging out.

waschl 5y ago

Once I discovered a (for me) new feature in the iOS Google Maps app, showing recently uploaded videos and images for places in my vicinity. I was randomly browsing through it until I found a video of a woman on a car‘s passenger seat trying to pee out of the side window. Wasn’t expecting her to succeed… Anyhow, reported it and went on, but couldn’t find it later when I wanted to show to friends.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Maps is spam spelled backwards, and is almost scam spelled backwards.

Y_Y 5y ago
Map cam sac spam scamps maps camp.
DonHopkins 5y ago
And "Google" is just "Go ogle" without the space. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9b4315d7-4a89-4bdb-8e78-cdbb273ac2e7 https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9b4315d7-4a89-4bdb-8e78-cdbb273...
ri0t 5y ago
You know what scam is spelled backwards... ;)
- ilammy 5y ago
  “Exactly. And not in your hands. And who makes M&M's?”

bluedino 5y ago

Young kids (10-11 years old) in my area seem to uploading selfies to Yelp for certain restaurants, as pictures of the food or the building. I've reported it and they don't take them down.

hxii 5y ago

It's incredibly annoying that this kind of thing is rampant, while my changes to places that are mislabeled or closed get declined.

cush 5y ago
In the scheme of things, maybe changes to places are far more important. If someone messes with the hours of operation of a store, they're directly affecting someone's livelihood. Naked man hiding on the far side of a panorama, not so much.
the_biot 5y ago
Consider making your changes in OpenStreetmaps. It's super easy to do in a mobile app, and the maps are great.
- moksly 5y ago
  This is a little unrelated but it’s a funny anecdote about submitting changes to OpenStreetmaps. A few years back we build an open source app to handle employee tax deductions and pay for work related driving together with a few other municipalities. Part of how it works relies on a local company to download data from OSM and feed it to us in an address to address routing api, but at one point we changed the driving direction on a rather important (very busy might be the right English?) street to become one-way. OSM got the direction wrong, so that it was suddenly impossible to reach the municipality of our second largest city. This was “fun” with tens of thousand of employees sending in issues, and I set out to fix it. So with our official municipality account (and not bothering to read the rules) I used Google maps as part of the evidence. I also included a photo I had taken from the street myself. Anyway, because you’re not allowed to reference Google maps I got our account banned and the change reversed so that OSM was wrong again, and it took me 3 days of arguing with the “amateur” contributors to get them to realise that I worked in the organisation who decided which way the direction of the street goes.
  - pwg 5y ago
    > I used Google maps as part of the evidence. This was the cause. OpenStreetMap has a very strict zero-tolerance policy of anything that might be sourced from a copywritten source. Maps were traditionally "big business" before OpenStreetMap, and map data was closely guarded (and the guards had no worries about attacking what they believed to be even the slightest infringements of their copyrights). > I also included a photo I had taken from the street myself. If you had used just the photo you took yourself, and not referenced Google at all, you'd have had no issue getting the fix made and having it stick.

q-rews 5y ago

Who cares about porn spam (ahem) when most of the photos on Google Maps are uploaded by clueless people? Google Maps made it too easy for people to tap “ok” and take every photo they took nearby and upload them in one swoop. Selfies, dogs, sunset photos. Sir this is a Wendy’s. At first I wonder how could people be so ridiculous by uploading all of these random photos and then I noticed this pattern in the app. I can’t find it anymore now though so maybe they dropped it, the photos are no longer autoselected in group. As a business owner basically I have to report 80% of the photos people upload.

faebi 5y ago
Same, I am an extensive google maps user and I see so many (home) family and kids pictures in any random place. The UI is not clear on what happens. Even I did it once nearly accidentally. At the same time, there are some funny ones in between. One person uploaded Caribbean beach pictures to the local public pool.
- rapnie 5y ago
  Maybe the whole images thing is yet another way for google to train their AI's.
emodendroket 5y ago
Most of that is charming and at worst just useless. Can't say that about a guy doinf exhibitionism.

notacoward 5y ago

Seems like after about the twentieth time Google could at least block someone from making changes, but apparently that's not considered a technical problem so nobody's interested.

NilsIRL 5y ago
From what I can tell, the individual(s?) use(s) different accounts for each uploaded picture.

legrande 5y ago

Spotify is full of 'user generated content' in the form of public playlists. Some people don't bother to set their playlists to private and we get to witness some people's bad taste (or good taste!) in music. Most people don't even use pseudonyms on Spotify and you can just search for their full legal name and see what music they like. It's an interesting heuristic to look at if you're playing the dating game too; 'Does this person like the same music as me? Let's find out!'

zinekeller 5y ago
Uhm, Venmo. Well, recently there are some changes to Venmo, but on its original form "social media for money"? Like, in other countries that would be a lawsuit (or more likely a government intervention). Apart from Venmo, I haven't heard or used a money-transfer (or equivalent) app that just shows your trail of payments publicly. In some countries, an equivalent system is either operated by a consortium of banks (a la Netherlands' iDEAL or Canada's Interac) or controlled by the central bank.
dvtrn 5y ago
I think I’m missing the comparison (probably because I’m still trying to wake up and get my brain through the boot process)
- zinekeller 5y ago
  Google Maps uses contribution from users to the point that something like the current topic happens. Spotify and Venmo on the other hand (by default) does the opposite: most users expected privacy but, uhm, they tried to be "Facebook, but for x" in an area where everyone (or at least most of their users) wants privacy and you get news reports of what public officials are listening to or spent.
  - dvtrn 5y ago
    Aha okay. Thank you for that, it really wasn’t clicking for a solid moment there. I agree re:Venmo and turned the sharing function off the moment I saw there was a livestream of what my friends were paying for. Always got a bit of a chuckle learning some of the code words people use for..things they’re paying for.

yen3k 5y ago

By judging from the images in the blog post these are basically just photos of a naked man. How does that classify as porn?

macksd 5y ago
This comment is an impressive level of missing-the-point pedantry even for Hacker News.

gmoore 5y ago

a naked guy on maps - sheesh - what's the big deal.

Lapsa 5y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXzFT7GEivo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXzFT7GEivo

fosshogg 5y ago

This is hilarious

skinkestek 5y ago

Google is amusing in many ways. I have some photos shared that I took in a restaurant if not at the end of the world then in a related place, far far away from Italy. The name of the restaurant however contains something that people will often search for in connection with Italy. That picture from a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere has maybe a hundred times more views than any of my other images from way more interesting places. Only reason I can see is it somehow has been mixed in when people searched for that search term, because the number of views on that single image is far more than the number of people in that area and probably more than that plus all tourists that have been there since 15 years ago ;-)