Item — HN Reader

media:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/24/google-map...

http://thenextweb.com/google/2015/04/24/theres-an-android-pe...

http://mashable.com/2015/04/24/android-bot-peeing-on-apple-l...

"Update: A Google spokesperson got back to us, explaining that the image is likely a result of a user abusing Map Maker, the tool that allows everyone to contribute to Google Maps. "Even though edits are moderated, occasionally the odd inaccurate or cheeky edit may slip through our system," he said in a statement to Mashable. "We've been made aware of the issue and are working on getting it removed.""

2 comments

And in the same area... https://goo.gl/maps/5t9br

wow, well i guess no one is actually reviewing at that zoom level?

How do people find these?

People live there? Want to look at the map where they are?

My colleague (sitting in front of me) found it casually by exploring the area with the peeing Android icon - it's very close :)

I simply can't believe that they are "working on getting it removed".

If it was a problem they didn't want the whole world to know about, it would've been removed the second they were made aware of the issue.

Have you ever worked for a large company before? There's nothing management loves more than access controls. There are whole software products available, like Confluence, that do nothing but take good open source offerings like various wikis and make it so management has to set permissions for every user for every page to do anything at all. Then whenever you need to make a change it takes a week of meetings to get edit permission for the needed page...

Confluence is awesome, we use it in our company and every user can edit every page (that's how it's set out of the box!). This works great for us and our size.

To bash on Confluence just because your management has set restrictive policies seems a bit unfair.

Why would you expect every random employee to have the necessary access to expedite such a change?

It's 5 AM in Mountain View, they probably have to get someone out of bed. Also, I imagine they would like to figure out where it came from, which may or may not complicate the removal, who knows.

Well, Google doesn't have office only in MV.

They totally have people working on maps in Dublin (for example)

There are the requisite forms to fill out, approvals to be gathered - it's going to take some time...

Seriously? I work at not so small tech company and here one of the managers/director/vp will take a call and the engineer will patch the changes. The call is specially easy is such obvious example of what should be done.

I don't think it's just calling one engineer - it's multiple teams that need to align for the change to push through.

There's almost certainly oodles of caches between the data and the images.