A Crowdsourcing Backfire

This is just the tip of an iceberg of internet abuse. Found this on Slashdot news. The issue is a problem to a very authentic solution that permits abuse and can go undetected.

Years back, there was a webinar (and book) from a former Google Senior QA Director where he describes how Google crowdsources Google Maps error reporting. It sounded wonderful but there was a concern for abusive reporting.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Wired about the one big problem that comes with crowdsourced data: enough eyeballs may make all bugs shallow, but may not fare as well against malice and greed:

Bertagna’s profits plummeted, he was forced to lay off some of his staff, and he struggled to understand what was happening. Only later did Bertagna come to suspect that he was the victim of a gaping vulnerability that made his Google listings open to manipulation.

These attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowdsourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google’s Mapmaker or Google Places for Business.

Read then entire article here on Slashdot, "How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business"