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By Root 902 0

if he worries about the new digital map technology—call it Maps 2.0—turning evil. He tells me that Michael Jones, Google Earth’s chief technologist, often points out that all new technologies seem scary, but months later you find yourself wondering what you ever did without them. “He once gave the example of how cell phones now are cameras and how that seemed scary and invasive. You could just go in the bathroom and take pictures of everyone and put them on the Internet! But are we banning cell phones in bathrooms? I haven’t seen that happen, because people just leave their cell phones in their pockets.”

The example is telling. After all, no one actually solved the problem of camera-phone snooping; we’ve just decided to live with it because the advantages of camera phones outweigh, for now, the occasional abuses. If restroom spying ever turned into an epidemic, we’d look for legal or technological solutions—banning camera phones that can snap photos silently, for example. By the same token, abuse of location-based technologies could also be solved by smarter devices and better privacy settings. But those solutions work best in a free-market democracy. They’d be of little comfort if you were living in a North Korea–style dictatorship using this technology to keep tabs on every suspected dissident at every second or in a Taliban-style theocracy that wanted to keep college students in after dark or women out of movie theaters.

It goes without saying, of course, that Maps 2.0 has saved lives as well, from hikers stranded on mountainsides to Hurricane Katrina victims. In January 2010, a magnitude-seven earthquake flattened Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Rescue workers didn’t know where to start; even the ones with GPS receivers quickly discovered that there were no good digital maps of Haiti. Google, to its credit, gave the United Nations full access to the usually proprietary data in its collaborative Map Maker tool, but the real hero of the hour was the OpenStreetMap project, an open-source alternative to Map Maker. OpenStreetMap is essentially the Wikipedia of maps: anyone can use it, anyone can change it in real time, and its data is free and uncopyrighted in perpetuity. When the earthquake struck, late Tuesday afternoon, Haiti was a white void in OpenStreetMap. Within hours, thousands of amateur mappers were collaborating all over the world, adding roads and buildings from aerial imagery to the database, until every back alley and footpath in Port-au-Prince had been charted. Relief workers updated the maps with traffic revisions, triage centers, and refugee centers, and just days later, the volunteer-drawn map was the United Nations’ go-to source of transportation information. “Many thanks to all crisis mappers for great contributions,” posted UNICEF emergency officer Jihad Abdalla. “You made my life much easier, since I’m a one-man show here . . . million thanks.”

Port-au-Prince, as it looked in OpenStreetMap when the earthquake hit and the way it looked a week later

After reading about the lives saved in Haiti by OpenStreetMap, I used it to look at my own neighborhood and found that the cul-de-sac we live on was also missing from the map. After hesitating a moment—is it really okay to draw on a map?—I added and labeled my street by hand, Wikipedia-style. It was a surprising rush to add something new, however trivial, to the world’s sum of geographical knowledge.* For a brief moment, I was Captain Cook charting the New Zealand coastline, a veritable Stanley of the suburbs.

Most of these new technologies are just reinventing how maps are made or the things they can be used for, but one particular innovation is changing the very definition of what a map is. “Augmented reality” is the practice of combining a real-world environment with computer-generated imagery, like those yellow “first down” lines that appear and disappear during televised football games. Until recently, augmented reality was a mostly theoretical idea, confined to laboratories where, no doubt, people used those big, clunky Lawnmower Man helmets