I don’t have a Facebook account, and I don’t like Facebook too much as a monolithic all-seeing corporation, but for OpenStreetMap, they haven’t really done anything out of malice or with bad intentions, and honestly with their recent MapWithAI and RapiD projects, I see only good coming out of their interest in improving OpenStreetMap.

The OSM ‘Old Guard’ have a long and impressive history of gatekeeping OpenStreetMap and preventing improvements out of scaremongering of future technologies (see any time someone brings up the iD editor, because apparantly consistent tagging is scandalous), but concerns about ML being inaccurate or potentially ruining the map are completely disregardable when (as with their current implementation in RapiD) they require human input and verification.

I truly believe most people in the OpenStreetMap community have good intentions, including most corporate mappers, and if corporations’ goals of better maps align with our own, co-operation is only a good thing. We shouldn’t scare away powerful allies (atleast in the mapping world, Facebook’s not really anyone’s ally in the privacy world) by gatekeeping whos allowed to contribute to OpenStreetMap.