Azerbaijani internet users have edited several addresses in Yerevan on Google Map, renaming them after their heroes.
Naira Zohrabyan of the opposition Prosperous Armenia party (PAP) raised alarm over the issue on Saturday morning, sharing the image of the map with changed addresses in central Yerevan.
“My residence address thus turns out a street named after a certain Polad Hasimov. Keep on preachig brotherhood with the Turk!” she said in a statement on Facebook.
A subsequent fact-checking by Tert.am also revealed addresses with Azerbaijani names in the Armenian capital.
A renamed location was also found in the village of Ptghunk in the north-western Armavir region.
‘Standard quantum hooliganism’: IT security expert on renamed Yerevan streets with Azerbaijani names
The recently edited Yerevan map with Azerbaijani street names should come as asbsolutely no surprise given that we encounter the practice time and again in different software applications, an IT security expert said today, responding to the growing concerns over the recently published Google Map image.
“Things of the kind are a common practice, which will be repeated also in the future,” Samvel Martirosyan told Tert.am, describing the Azerbaijani internet users’ move as a “standard quantum hooliganism”.
“The Google operation is based on inputs by different subscribers, i.e. – anything we see on Google Map is added by individual users. There are certainly addresses posted from websites, but in most cases definitely, it is people themselves that create the content. That’s how almost all the maps function in essence. And that’s the opportunity which they practically used now. After an individual user indicates a location name which is confirmed by several other users, [the adddress] appears automatically once it attracts the required number of conformations,” he explained.