Whether or not a source of map data is "authoritative" is unrelated to accuracy or completeness. The metrics authorities optimize for are rarely what impacts users most, since legal authority comes with liability that is in direct tension with coverage and recency. This is a trap that mapping orgs have constantly fallen into, since processes that assign responsibility to a 3rd party are the easiest way to make a basemap that fulfills CYA. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" in maps translates to "Nobody got fired for trusting the US gov't".

"Unique in the Crowd", the famous paper that re-id'd 95% of individuals in a mobility dataset using just four GPS points, did so with half the temporal resolution and half the spatial resolution I am seeing in most city's formal anonymization policies for handling mobility data. The same paper also found that "the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution.", in other words, these policies should expect even worse re-id protection than the oft quoted figures. nature.com/articles/srep0…