A German artist wandered around Berlin for a while, chasing in a cart near a hundred active smartphones, making Google Maps believe that a traffic jam had formed there. A manipulation that makes us reflect on the always possible manipulation of data in the applications that we use …
Simon Weckert is a clever little fellow This Berlin artist had the idea of fooling the Googe Maps cartography tool by dragging behind him, in the streets of his city, a small cart loaded with 99 smartphones including the geolocation mode was activated.
The Google tool taking into account the number of phones putting a signal in a given geographical area to assess a potential traffic loaded (or not), he believed that almost a hundred people were in the same time in this street and that a traffic jam took place where Simon was walking quietly in an art that was almost empty!
Google then immediately displayed the traffic jam on Maps and indicated a secondary route for motorists using the navigation tool.
The artist’s goal has been achieved, as he explains on his site: this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red, which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being blocked in traffic. Maps and models of the world based on Google’s simulation complete the actuality and perception of physical spaces and the development of action models. What he wanted to show
So you know what you have to do if you want to avoid the morning or evening traffic jams in your city. And one can imagine the story that a good screenwriter could draw on the basis of this experiment
Online rule at : https://www.regle-en-ligne.fr
Google, for its part, praised the performance of a good play on the part of the artist, adding: Google Maps is based on machine learning algorithms (machine learning). The computer never handled this case of an isolated person with 99 smartphones. This is not a case predicted by one of the three scenarios for the evaluation of traffic jams that we imagined. It was the most pessimistic who got busy in this case. But no doubt it will generate some internal thinking
The cart containing the 99 smartphones (used) used by Simon Weckert. Source: Simon Weckert
Video explaining Simon Weckert’s hack against Google Maps. Source: YouTube
