Lets be real here: There’s a whole lot of us out there to rely on GPS navigation apps to get ourselves from point A to point B because why not, right? GPS apps are just so damn convenient and you’ll be hard pressed to find a smartphone that doesn’t come with Google Maps pre-installed (unless of course you own a Huawei device). That being said though, perhaps we rely on our GPS apps a little too much.
If Waze or Google Maps show that there’s a massive crawl on your route, you’re going to believe it because hey, the app’s sole purpose in this life is to inform you of these things with somewhat accuracy. A recent video posted online however, shows just how easy it is to fool a navigation app like Google Maps.
The video, which was posted by a Berlin based artist called Simon Weckert, shows a man walking down streets in the city pulling a wagon filled with 99 smartphones that are all using Google Maps to navigate. The longer he pulls the wagon, the more red the streets become on Google Maps. As ya’ll probably already know, red streets on any navigation app is the last thing you’d want to see as it indicates bad traffic but the streets in this case were clear as day.
This little experiment by Weckert, whose work focuses on examining the value and impact of technology, sheds light on how apps like Google determine what’s going on on the road. Once someone opens the app, the company uses anonymized location data to determine traffic conditions in the area. So, when there’s a whole bunch of devices running Maps in the same area, the system interprets that as a traffic jam.
It’s a thought provoking experiment that really gets you questioning in what other ways GPS apps can be fooled. I mean, a dude with a wagon and a bunch of phones managed to trick an app that google probably poured a lot of money into. Imagine what someone with a little bit of capital could achieve.
But then again, perhaps companies like Google only prep for more “sophisticated” hacks, which would explain why they were left exposed when someone came up with something as simple and ingenious as pulling a cart full of smartphones to create a virtual traffic jam.
