The OpenStreetMap Foundation on January 16, 2012:
Last week Mocality, a Kenyan business data startup, caught Google scraping their data and the post made it to boing boing. Mocality tracked this down with some analysis of their logs and a sting operation, even recording phone calls that Google staff made which contained false information. Google have apologized and the incident looked closed, at least from the outside.
Unfortunately we have to report something similar is still happening to us from the same source.
On the heels of the Mocality scandal, Google India IPs were discovered vandalizing OpenStreetMap data. The damage included moving information, deleting data, and reversing directions of one-way streets. How pervasive was the behavior?
In fact over the last year we have had over 102 thousand hits on OSM using at least 17 accounts from this Google IP.
It is getting harder to believe that at least certain segments of Google aren’t encouraging such behavior. It is even harder to believe Google’s ignorance. On the plus side, they were open about distancing themselves.