Users of Apple Maps trying to find their way around Kabul in Afghanistan, might have done a double take at seeing such street names as "Bad Monkey" and "Hillbilly Hameed" using Apple Maps in the capital city of the country. Yaroslav Trofimov, The Wall Street Journal's Kabul bureau chief spotted the phony names and tweeted the information with the hashtag #TooGoodToBeTrue.
Looking for Bad Monkey Boulevard?
Those made-up street names came from OpenStreetMap data and were added a few years ago by Afghan students either as a prank or as a way to temporarily name a road in dispute. OpenStreetMap is a mapping service that can be edited by users and has been heavily relied upon by Apple to fill out its beleaguered Apple Maps application. It is another black eye for a mapping service that police in Australia called "life-threatening" for its potential to take users into a dangerous section of the Outback with little hope of survival.
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OpenStreetMap Team director Kate Chapman said that the problem could have come from Apple using "an old snapshot of the OpenStreetMap data and [not updating] it since, so things like 'personal' street names are in there, even if they have been fixed since." Chapman finds it interesting that while Apple used OpenStreetMap for Kabul, it do not do so for an area like Kupang, Indonesia which is just a dot on Apple Maps, but has a detailed map on OSM.
Alan, an ardent smartphone enthusiast and a veteran writer at PhoneArena since 2009, has witnessed and chronicled the transformative years of mobile technology. Owning iconic phones from the original iPhone to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, he has seen smartphones evolve into a global phenomenon. Beyond smartphones, Alan has covered the emergence of tablets, smartwatches, and smart speakers.
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