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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 26 2018, @12:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the end-of-the-world dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Grab is messing up the world's largest mapping community's data in Southeast Asia

Grab, Southeast Asia's top ride-hailing company, has hit a roadblock in its efforts to improve its mapping and routing service after running into trouble with OpenStreetMap, the world's largest collaborative mapping community, through a series of blundering edits in Thailand.

Grab, which gobbled up Uber's local business in exchange for an equity swap earlier this year, has busily added details and upgraded the maps it uses across its eight markets in Southeast Asia.

[...] Grab's effort to improve the never-ending quest of more accurate maps involves a multi-input approach that uses Google Maps as the base with Grab adding in its own information — "points of interest" cultivated through customer feedback and groundwork — and other public or licensed information.

However, what appears to be a focus on speed has seen it suspend all activities in Thailand — Southeast Asia's second-largest economy — after it was found to have overwritten data developed by OpenStreetMap (OSM) with inaccurate edits that were created by a remote team based in India.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 26 2018, @02:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 26 2018, @02:06PM (#778548)

    1. You can't copyright facts
    2. Tracing over an image is not itself copyright infringement
    3. Copyright infringement isn't stealing
    4. Most of Google's content was provided by third parties in the first place
    5. Grab had a much better map at their disposal, but ruined it by using "what Google offers"

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