Trick Google Maps with 99 phones: Here’s how deserted streets have become busy
A German artist has found a way to trick Google’s map service into causing him to produce incorrect information about the state of traffic.
Do you remember when there were no solutions like Google Maps? We wandered in search of the destination a bit at random, perhaps asking some passersby for information, hoping not to get lost in an unknown city.
Since Maps entered everyday use, it has changed the way we orient ourselves in an unknown area; it helps us find and find places, clubs, shops that otherwise we would not have noticed and allows us to plan more efficiently our itineraries.
For some time, Google Maps has also included real-time information on the state of traffic, showing those congested roads in red and thus allowing us to evaluate an alternative route. But be careful, this information can be ” easily ” sweetened.
Like? This was demonstrated by a German artist passionate about technology, Simon Weckert, who recovered 99 second-hand telephones and placed them in a trolley, carrying them along between streets and lanes.
The Google Maps servers interpreted this as traffic congestion, which was shown on the map to all users of the service. And this, on the other hand, may have prompted drivers to move to another route to avoid a road actually without traffic.
The purpose of this experiment may have shown a weak point in the Google Maps data management system. Still, it also demonstrates how the decisions we make in the newspaper are now heavily conditioned by technology as if we decided to relieve the brain from the tiring task of making decisions. When maybe it would be enough to use a little more common sense.
