Places `2026-06-17.0`: places snapped to a constant latitude form a straight east–west band over unpopulated desert

[malgar]

Summary

In the June release (2026-06-17.0) there is a systematic linear artifact in Places: a dense, narrow band of points aligned along a (near-)constant latitude. It is most clearly visible over sparsely populated desert in northern Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the surrounding region, where there is no real place density to mask it.

Evidence

Affected release

• 2026-06-17.0

Steps to reproduce

1. Load the places theme from release 2026-06-17.0.
2. Visualize the point geometries on a map.
3. Zoom to northern Sudan / Saudi Arabia (and scan the wider desert belt at similar latitudes).
4. Observe a thin, dense east–west band of points along a constant latitude.

Happy to provide the approximate latitude of the band, a bounding box, and example GERS IDs if useful.

[jeffdefacto]

Hi Miguel Alvarez (@malgar),

Thanks for creating this issue. This is a known band of bad data that we actually largely, but not completely, eliminated with the removal of points outside of their country boundary in June.

Before

After

We are actively building some additional heuristics to better classify and potentially filter data like this, but in the meantime, the confidence values for these remaining features is quite low with most around .26 so if you have a use case where these are unsightly, you can try applying a modest filter to confidence to remove them.

[malgar]

Hi Jeff Underwood (@jeffdefacto) - Thanks for the detailed response and for the suggested workaround.

Since this is a known issue, I'll close this one.