MapWatch: Detecting and Monitoring International Border Personalization on Online Maps

Gary Soeller, Karrie Karahalios, Christian Sandvig, Christo Wilson

Abstract: Maps have long played a crucial role in enabling people to conceptualize and navigate the world around them. However, maps also encode the world-views of their creators. Disputed international borders are one example of this: governments may mandate that cartographers produce maps that conform to their view of a territorial dispute. Today, online maps maintained by private corporations have become the norm. However, these new maps are still subject to old debates. Companies like Google and Bing resolve these disputes by localizing their maps to meet government requirements and user preferences, i.e., users in different locations are shown maps with different international boundaries. We argue that this non-transparent personalization of maps may exacerbate nationalistic disputes by promoting divergent views of geopolitical realities. To address this problem, we present MapWatch, our system for detecting and cataloging personalization of international borders in online maps. Our system continuously crawls all map tiles from Google and Bing maps, and leverages crowdworkers to identify border personalization. In this paper, we present the architecture of MapWatch, and analyze the instances of border personalization on Google and Bing, including one border change that MapWatch identified live, as Google was rolling out the update.