Google Maps, NY Guns, and reasonable data expectations.

While the entire nation was in an uproar about New York’s plunge over the slippery slope of lost public trust, one thing seemed obvious to a number cruncher like me. The map cannot possibly be current, complete, or even accurate, because the data cannot be. What has happened though, is we have realized that a State that requires gun registration can (and will) soon after release permit information to the public. Living in a state where permits are not required this is concerning. Perhaps the most practical result of politically charged partisans divulging what they believe to be their opponent’s addresses, will actually backfire in more ways than one. How is that for contradicting their own agenda?

How simple was this to realize? Well, feel free to zoom into any site familiar to you on Google maps. Flip on “satellite” view, or even street view, and try to guess what year that photo was taken. I tried this with a house I moved out of in 2007 and there’s my truck in the driveway. With the piles of data that Google attempts to juggle there is only one answer to the processing challenge… batching. When trying to database the entire planet you can bet those batches can be separated by years, not days. Even websites on the internet have become so outdated in Google’s index that they will reference a non existent page for years after it was removed. This just keeps getting worse, but what’s even more suspicious is that Google represents the more competent side of this 2 sided coin.

In order to post “gun owner” addresses Google had to reference a government database of gun registrations. If you think my description of Google’s concurrency challenges was bad, the state is the worst. They are almost always as incompetent as they come. This isn’t 24, with Jack Bauer and a team of the best IT people in the world. I’ve known some good IT guys, and can assure you NONE of them would would work for the government for fear that gubment incompetence is contagious. So the formula is almost certainly useless. The saying: “good enough for government work” describes this syndrome pretty accurately.

Recently some wise states have begun asking the private sector to bail them out of the tangled mess that unaccountable pseudo-developers get them into. We get inquiries from government agencies regularly but we do not allow our staff to be held captive to misguided bureaucracy. They are too smart for that, so the only contracts we accept are self-managed. We don’t need no stinking Dilbertesque PHB experimenting with project management while we are on task. So watch out northwestern USA. If local government entities do get their act together the next time someone wants to publish a government dataset, the results might actually be correct!