Google Maps is incredibly useful. It tells you how to find a place without arguing with anyone sitting next to you with a huge map. There is even an end to endless conversations with family about which way you are going home. I followed Satnav like everyone else, I don’t know which way no one else does because of Jesus Christ. A man drives a large trailer full of cellophane behind him, creating a traffic jam around the city.
It’s a reliable tool that – usually quite accurately – tells you how to get to where you want to go quickly and how to avoid traffic. However, it turns out that it is quite easy to hack. All you need is the phone’s shut load and bad attitude. Artist Simon Weckert thus “hacked” Google Maps for a project, causing fake traffic jams to follow him wherever he went. To “hack”, Weckert kept 99 phones and bought SIM cards for them online, Vice reported. He then left the SIM cards on the phone, loaded Google Maps on all of them, and loaded them into his wagon.
They failed to consider whether it could be an artist, something that programmers probably didn’t guess at the planning stage of Google Maps. Data is a two-way street, and open Google Maps told Google that the road he was walking on was full of traffic in a very small area. “By transporting smartphones on the road I have been able to create virtual traffic that will drive cars on other routes,” Weckert told Motherboard. “Ironically it could create a real traffic jam somewhere else in the city.”
He spent an hour or two walking in the same area to create traffic jams, probably sending people to other routes using Google Maps to avoid “traffic”. The project, like his other work, he told Motherboard, was intended for people to think about
the data we relied on.
“Data is always collected for specific purposes, including people, technology, finance, trade, and government. “Data is translated which can represent the images, lists, graphs, and maps that
the data represents are all explained and there is nothing called neutral data”. Weckert wrote on his website. It is certainly talking to people as well as creating ways to use this information for evil deeds. “Traffic data on Google Maps is constantly refreshed for information from a variety of sources, including location services and integrated anonymous information from people who have contributed to the Google Maps community,” they said. Google has confirmed to 9to5Google that they are using a large number
of devices in a small space with traffic jams as an indication.
We’ve introduced the ability to distinguish between cars and motorcycles in a number of countries, including India, Indonesia, and Egypt as well.
