Google Mapathon 2013: search giant's another brush with Indian police - Northern Voices Online

Google Mapathon 2013 is attracting police investigation. But for search giant this is not the first brush with Indian police and investigative agencies. Google Mapathon 2013 is attracting two very different groups of people in India. While among Google maps fan, it is attracting people for its obvious interest to them but it has got another very different group interested in it. Indian agencies are investigating the very popular Google Mapathon. Google had asked people to make the map all the more useful and easy to access and this has become a huge success in the country. But India's map making agency Survey of India was obviously unhappy with it as it thinks that anything to do with the map of the country is prerogative of it and no one else. It complained to the police that Google Mapathon was against the integrity of India. Delhi Police that comes under the direct supervision of India's union home ministry is investigating if Google had actually acted against the integrity of India by asking people to provide more local information about the map. Google on the other hand said that it had provided answers to police questions and said there was nothing wrong in asking for local info as it wanted Map to be more informative than the existing ones. In the meantime the issue has reached at the doors of Indian Parliament as an opposition BJP MP Tarun Vijay has said that he will raise the issue in Indian Parliament. Talking to an Indian newspaper he said, "It is shocking…I am going to raise the issue of India's mapping policy, the relevant laws and the Google's violations in the next sitting of parliament beginning April 22". The contest always gets rousing welcome. In the contest launched in the month of February, Google had invited its users to help "create better maps for India". This was to be done by adding information of their neighbourhoods. To make the project a thumping success, the Internet Giant had promised that top 1,000 mappers would receive prizes in the form of tablets, gift vouchers and Smartphones. Sensing trouble, the Survey of India, the national surveying and map-making body of the country, filed a complaint with the Delhi police accusing Google of violating India's national map policy.  However this is not for the first time that the internet giant has ran into trouble with the country's legal system. In 2011, Google's much hyped Street View program was stopped following the government's orders after it raised similar security concerns among authorities. But search giant's brush with law enforcement agencies on maps are not new. In the past too, the Google maps have been embroiled in one controversy after the other. In the Google India maps, it had shown Arunachal Pradesh to be a part of China. In a statement issued at that time the company had apologized about the grave error and stated: "Earlier this week, as part of routine update to Google Earth, we published new data for the Arunachal Pradesh region that changed the depiction of certain place names in the product. The change was a result of a mistake in our processing of new map data." Apart from the Eastern state being shown part of the Red Dragon, the company had erred again by depicting Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) to be a part of Pakistan. Apart from its mapping service, Google Earth, too had received a lot of brick bat. Google Earth is a service of Google that lets users to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings. The Indian security agencies had earlier been complaining that Google Earth exposes Indian defense and other sensitive installations, thereby posing a threat to the national security. But things are going to be sorted out pretty soon. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHFpXIwGcCJhawgSVyFl8nKagyROw&url=http://nvonews.com/2013/04/07/google-mapathon-2013-search-giant%25E2%2580%2599s-another-brush-with-indian-police/

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