Guy fools Google and Apple Maps into naming a road after him
One guy managed to get the government and a group of official mapping apps to list a road named after him. And he got away with it for over four years.
In 2013, Ge Yulu, an artist in Beijing, found a street that didn't carry a street sign. So he put up an official-looking sign with his own name on it.
The road, located near the city's Chaoyang district, is about 460m (1,509 ft) long, and about a 10-minute walk end-to-end.
Local reports said the road used to be inside a residential compound, but ended up outside of it after some construction and rezoning.
In an viral essay written on Zhihu, China's Quora, Ge documented with fascination, how his own sign ended up creeping into official records -- and eventually onto online maps such as Apple Maps, Google Maps, Baidu Maps and AutoNavi.
Autonavi first named the street after him in 2014, and that other map apps soon followed suit.
Autonavi -- owned by Alibaba -- provides map data to Apple and Google, and is one of the most widely used mapping services in the country.
Ge, a graduate student at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, had put up the custom signs as part of an art piece for school.
Beijing's roadworks authority soon began to number street lamps with the road's unofficial name in late 2015, Ge said.
The street signs were part of Ge's thesis project, and played on the double meaning of his name, which contains the Chinese word for "road." In an interview for a college publication, Ge said that he aimed to explore the meaning of his identity and privacy in a public space.
He had previously spray-painted his name on the entrances of his alma mater, Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, and written his name all over noticeboards, toilets and blackboards on campus.
"When I went to Beijing, I found that this metropolis had a lot of nooks and crannies," he said. "Could 'Ge Yulu' survive in such a nook, in a place people usually ignored? That was at the root of this work, this idea."
A later version of the artwork was displayed at a graduation exhibition in the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Officials told Southern Metropolis Daily that the unauthorised signs Ge put up will be taken down tomorrow. Only city planners and the local government had the right to name roads, officials said.
Ge told Bejing Youth Daily that he realised that his artwork could have broken the law.
"When I first designed the project I merely thought of it as a work of art, and I didn't think that it could actually be the name for the road," Ge said. "But I realise that this might have affected the appearance of the city, and that it isn't exactly legal."
A Baidu spokesperson told Mashable that the company uses its street view data collection team to autonomously update any changes to maps. "China's roads change very quickly," the spokesperson said. "When [there are] changes in signage along the road, our team directly collates photos from the street, and the system will autonomously recognise changes."
Human and machines cross-check the data before it goes online, the spokesperson added. The company also uses user reports to ensure that the data is "holistic, accurate, and up-to-date."
"Users could report any changes or errors to maps, and they'll be online after we verify these reports," said the spokesperson.
An AutoNavi staff member told Beijing Youth Daily that the company also collects road names autonomously, with new roads mapped by a combination of official and user-generated data. Like Baidu, user reports are confirmed manually.
The staff member added that it was possible that the checks were not rigorous enough, and that they could have overlooked inaccuracies because of the street sign.
Mashable has reached out to Google for comment.
UPDATE: July 13, 2017, 10:31 p.m. SGT Added Baidu's comments about data collection.
Topics Google
I am an intern with Mashable Asia, focusing on viral news, lifestyle news and feature news in the region.
