Google IT contractors forced out on vandalism charges

Two IT contractors at Google have been thrown from their contracts with the company for sabotaging an online service similar to Google Maps.

Taking aim at community-built OpenStreetMap, the contract ‘Googlers’ made unhelpful edits to New York, such as reversing one-way streets, and London, where they added a fake Olympic stadium.

Posting these charges on OSM’s blog, founder Steve Coast said it responded to the “vandalism” last Thursday, by freezing the account of a Google-owned IP address that was traced to India.

Asking about the “abusing” of its data, OSM was told in email from the account-holder that the open-source platform’s rules were understood, so it restored  access to the account. But then the user – or users, simply resumed their sabotage.

“Obviously we are unreservedly apologetic that this has occurred,” a Google spokeswoman told CUK yesterday.

“The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are no longer working on Google projects.”  

OSM did its bit to play down the incident too. In an update, the group said there was no “grand conspiracy” inside Google against its platform, despite the single IP address at Google showing at least 17 accounts.

“These actions are somewhat baffling given our past good relationship with Google which has included donations and Summer of Code work,” OSM said, in its initial post.

“As a community we take the quality of our data extremely seriously and look forward to an explanation from Google and an undertaking to not allow this kind of thing to happen in the future.”

The explanation has surely followed by now, as a FAQs list posted this week by OSM says it is “talking” to Google and “sharing" information on the incident.

As to the requested undertaking, CUK asked Google whether “any actions” would be taken so copycat acts of vandalism (against OSM) could not be launched by IT contractors at its other sites, specifically those in UK. The spokeswoman declined to comment.