FRONTIER - Maphead - page 160

With Google's famous “Don't be evil” motto in mind, I ask Paul Rademacher if he wor-
riesaboutthenewdigital maptechnology—call itMaps2.0—turningevil.Hetellsmethat
MichaelJones,GoogleEarth'schieftechnologist,oftenpointsoutthat all newtechnologies
seem scary, but months later you find yourself wondering what you ever did without them.
“Heoncegavetheexampleofhowcellphonesnowarecamerasandhowthatseemedscary
andinvasive.Youcouldjustgointhebathroomandtakepicturesofeveryoneandputthem
on the Internet! But are we banning cell phones in bathrooms? I haven't seen that happen,
because people just leave their cell phones in their pockets.”
The example is telling. After all, no one actually solved the problem of camera-phone
snooping; we've just decided to live with it because the advantages of camera phones out-
weigh, for now, the occasional abuses. If restroom spying ever turned into an epidemic,
we'd look for legal or technological solutions—banning camera phones that can snap pho-
tos silently, for example. By the same token, abuse of location-based technologies could
also be solved by smarter devices and better privacy settings. But those solutions work
best in a free-market democracy. They'd be of little comfort if you were living in a North
Korea-style dictatorship using this technology to keep tabs on every suspected dissident at
every second or in a Taliban-style theocracy that wanted to keep college students in after
dark or women out of movie theaters.
It goes without saying, of course, that Maps 2.0 has saved lives as well, from hikers
stranded on mountainsides to Hurricane Katrina victims. In January 2010, a magnitude-
sevenearthquakeflattenedPort-au-Prince,thecapitalofHaiti.Rescueworkersdidn'tknow
where to start; even the ones with GPS receivers quickly discovered that there were no
good digital maps of Haiti. Google, to its credit, gave the United Nations full access to the
usually proprietary data in its collaborative Map Maker tool, but the real hero of the hour
wastheOpenStreetMapproject,anopen-sourcealternativetoMapMaker.OpenStreetMap
is essentially the Wikipedia of maps: anyone can use it, anyone can change it in real time,
and its data is free and uncopyrighted in perpetuity.When the earthquake struck, late Tues-
day afternoon, Haiti was a white void in OpenStreetMap. Within hours, thousands of ama-
teur mappers were collaborating all over the world, adding roads and buildings from aeri-
al imagery to the database, until every back alley and footpath in Port-au-Prince had been
charted. Relief workers updated the maps with traffic revisions, triage centers, and refugee
centers, and just days later, the volunteer-drawn map was the United Nations' go-to source
of transportation information. “ Many thanks to all crisis mappers for great contributions,”
posted UNICEF emergency officer Jihad Abdalla. “You made my life much easier, since
I'm a one-man show here . . . million thanks.”