Blink and you'll miss it
Hot on the heals of the news that the member list of the BNP had been leaked onto the internet yesterday it was only a matter of time before people started suggesting that someone create an interactive Google Map of the member locations.
And then it was only a short amount of time before someone actually did – and an even shorter period of time before it was taken down.
X marks the spot
TechCrunch UK broke the news this morning that Ben Charlton had plugged the two together to create an overlay on Google Maps pinpointing member addresses.
Charlton wrote on his site Spod.cx:
"Curious about the list, I managed to find a copy and after checking it for the obvious odd family members or people you know and think might be members, I thought it’d be cool to make a Google Maps mashup of the data."
However, wary of mapping out the exact addresses of people on the list, he sought to anonymise the data before using it.
"I extracted the postcodes from the member list and converted them into latitude and longitude co-ordinates, which are then plotted on the map," he wrote.
However, although the map was useful for visualising where the clusters of members lay across the country, the attempts to mask the real data introduced its own problems – mostly that if you zoomed in far enough, the pins on the map showed specific (deliberately incorrect) addresses, which could be mistaken for BNP members' houses.
The devil is in the detail
As a result, Charlton removed the interactive map, instead replacing it with a static heat map of the UK.
"I have decided to take down the map," he wrote.
"Many people have commented that the map does give a false impression of accuracy, despite my making this clear, and I’m tempted to agree.
"I do not want to single anybody out and by removing the accuracy from the map it is possible that it ends up incorrectly implying a property contains a BNP member.
"It has been suggested that an inaccurate map that doesn’t make that clear is worse than publishing the list itself, and I think that’s a reasonable comment."
You can find the static map on Charlton's site. Despite the BNP's best efforts to prevent the original list being published, it's still available on the internet if you know where to look.
Spod.cx (via TechCrunch UK)
Related:
Blog: The BNP, privacy and Pandora's box
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