We all know that Google Maps is an incredibly useful application. It informs us of how to get from one place to another without having to waste time looking at maps or asking passersby. You don’t need to ask anyone but Google Maps. The tool will guide us to our destination, along a more or less successful path and avoiding any traffic jam that may arise along the way. As well. One artist, Simon Weckert, wanted to test an experiment to see if he could fool Google Maps by simulating a virtual traffic jam. Guess what happened? Exactly. Weckert managed to “hack” Google Maps. And it is easier than we thought.
As it did?
Simply armed with a forklift and 99 smartphones, he managed to create traffic jams while walking through the city, turning a small trailer in which all the mobile phones – rented – were with their respective SIM cards activated and the previous installation of the Google Maps app in each one of them. His walk through the city led Google Maps to believe that traffic jams were emerging (false, actually). Traffic jams that followed Weckert as he moved through the city streets, of course. The artist chose a time when traffic was light. The objective of this curious experiment, which he carried out last summer – although he did not want to publish such a street ‘hack’ until the 15th anniversary of the launch of Google Maps arrived – was to show that we trust excessively in traffic technology to although, clearly, it has certain limitations. As the Berlin artist has shown.
The application, convinced of the traffic jam, redirected drivers to avoid those streets. Data from a two-way street, and open Google maps claimed that the streets were packed with traffic in a very small area. And the thing is that a colossal traffic jam appeared on Google Maps, but practically no vehicle circulated on the streets. Thus , when entering the application, you could see through the streets of Berlin, a large red line that denotes end-to-end traffic in several streets – which normally run quietly. It’s funny how the culprit was a man walking slowly through the city pulling a red wheelbarrow.
It is clear that the programmers had not anticipated during the planning phase of Google Maps that someone could try such an experiment. This hack also answers some questions we’ve all probably asked ourselves at some point about how the well-known Google Maps app actually works.
“Ironically, it can create a real bottleneck in another part of town,” Weckert explained.
We blindly trust technology
He also put on record the trust we place in virtual data that, as the artist explains on his website, “data is always collected for a specific purpose, through a combination of people, technology, money, commerce and government.”
Their concept street experiment sparked a lot of conversation on social media, and Google later confirmed that they do indeed use the presence of a large number of devices running in a small area as an indication that a traffic jam exists.
“Traffic data on Google Maps is continually updated thanks to information from various sources, including anonymous data from people who have location services turned on and contributions to the Google Maps community,” said a Google spokesperson. They have also said that this “hack” will help them improve Google Maps.
Users are already contributing ideas to play with the system based on the German artist’s experiment, while others think it worked too well and could have dangerous consequences.
