Goog Maps FAIL: Misdirecting Voters and Invading Countries

Bravo Google, you’ve had an impressive amount of fail lately. On Monday (Election Day) Google Maps provided polling place information on their site…and they got it wrong. There were 700,000 people who would have been sent to the wrong polling place had they relied on Google. We don’t know how many did or if this led to anything bad, but really, if you’re going to provide this type of information you can’t screw it up.

Think that’s bad, what about almost starting a war? Well the Nicaraguan military used Google Maps to look at it’s boarder with Costa Rica and because the Costa Ricans were apparently on Nicaraguan territory, troops entered, took down the Costa Rican flag and put theirs up. Man it’s just so embarrassing when you’re wrong on something like that and have to put the flag back up and leave. Good thing Costa Rica lacks a military or else it could have been a real incident.

Well I’m not convinced it’s a good idea for militaries to rely on Google Maps (or any online maps) for their decisions to enter occupied territories, but it’s worth noting that if they used Bing they would have known the proper boarder.