The leak of the details of 10,000-odd members of the British National Party could almost have been made for a mashup. (Insert your own joke about the BNP trying to appear ready for government by having a data leak.)
And so someone has, although as its author notes - and you should too, please -
I extracted the postcodes from the member list and converted them into latitude and longitude co-ordinates, which are then plotted on the map. These markers are not at all accurate - they point out postcode location only.
(Emphasis in original.)
The map, given how it contains so many bits of information, may crash your PC; and you should treat any information you find there as being approximate.
Just because Google's pushpin is on that house at the corner doesn't mean they're BNP members. (Near where I live, the Chinese restaurant appears to be a member, which I find unlikely.)
However it is indicative of where the strongholds, if you like, of BNP engagement are. Politicians who wonder about voter disengagement and disillusionment might like to look at the zoomed-out version.
Mike Butcher at says at TechCrunch UK:
I still believe that a map which showed more general areas, like towns and cities, could actually be helpful to local authorities for creating policies to tackle attitudes towards diversity. If you were a local councillor and had been made aware that there were lots of BNP members in your area, you may be able to do something about the attitudes which leads to support for such a far-right political party.
But now this more accurate map is out of the bag, and others are probably planning similar maps, the implications are far reaching. What no-one would wish is for a witch-hunt to begin. Plotting this map will make the data available to just about anyone. My personal opinion is that in this, quite accurate form, it should be taken down. On the one hand the BNP has a notorious history of violence. On the other, it also has a history of attracting disaffected young people who later regret joining - their lives should not be tarred by their actions as naive youngsters.
I think we can agree on that.
Update 1235: the Google map has been removed and replaced with a "heat map". Charlton comments in the revised post:
I have decided to take down the map. 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.
So - all happy now?
Update 2: Tom Steinberg of MySociety puts forward the case for not mashing the data:
the moment you sacrifice the values and compromises that hold together liberal democracies (such as a presumption of innocence and a right to privacy for people who've not actually been convicted of crimes) for the sake of humiliating your political opponents, you're starting on a path far more likely to result in ruination for us all than a bunch of marginal wing nuts.
And he prefaces his remarks "as someone who'd have been gassed by the Nazis simply by virtue of family name..."
I think we can call Godwin on the whole thing, then.
