
Google Maps Hacks - rsj_hn
http://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html
======
netsharc
An interesting "red but no traffic" phenomenon is in Iceland, with roads which
are next to scenery viewing points. The roads are mostly empty in this
country, but everyone must've slowed down when they saw the breathtaking
scenery, and would pull into the viewing point's parking spot to stop and take
pictures. On Google Maps these areas were marked red.

On another navigation related topic; I was using Waze in a high-traffic city,
where even the alternate routes have a lot of traffic. I was thinking, it
surely would be possible for Waze to look back along my route and calculate
which route would have been better for me.

E.g. if I drove from A via B, C, D, E towards Z, and there was an alternate
route A-B-F-G-E-Z, and the route branches out at B (you can either take path
B-C-D-E or path B-F-G-E), the app could find a car that was near me at point
B, and went to F later on. It would then know the time I would have needed to
drive from B to F. This ghost car doesn't need to go all the way to E, if it
turned off at F, the app could find another car, one which at that point was
at point F and later on drove to G (or better, E), and then see how much time
they took. And so on for each segment of my alternate route...

~~~
jrochkind1
So I'm stuck in a traffic jam, and google maps is telling me I can take an
alternate route to avoid it and save 25 minutes vs waiting in the traffic jam.
Something that occurs to me as I sit in this traffic...

what portion of all the other driver's around me also looking at google maps?
Is Google Maps telling them to take the same alternate route as me? Are they
all going to do it? If they all do it, does the alternate route (which likely
can't handle as much traffic as the original route) just became as jammed as
waiting in traffic? Or even worse, if they're all going to do what google maps
says, would I in fact be much better off ignoring it and sticking to the
original route?

It's hard to tell what's imagination/selection bias, but following google maps
traffic-jam-avoidance suggestions has seemed disastrous enough to me enough
times that I mostly just stick to the original route now. (Of course, one
could also imagine using one's own route knowledge to pick an alternate route
of one's own without google maps...)

I suppose google maps could be smart enough to tell half the people to go one
way and half the other... I kind of doubt it is, but one could imagine a
computerized route direction system which, if enough driver's had it, could
actually maximize efficiency by sending different drivers different routes
intentionally... I'm not holding my breath for it.

~~~
rland
Well the other route presumably has a significant throughput. If 1000 car/min
are in traffic, and the side-road has a 200 car/min capacity, the first 20% of
people to leave the main road will experience no additional traffic.

Now, let's say that the 200 car/min turns to a bottleneck of 100 car/min if
it's overwhelmed 10 mins downstream of the turnoff. If google routes >200
car/min to the turnoff, there will eventually be a significant traffic jam:
cars will pile up at the bottleneck, and even if waze stops routing to the
turnoff at that point, the jam would still travel upwards like a pressure wave
until it hits the turnoff.

I'd have a hard time believing it's possible for waze to know beforehand what
those throughputs are, so some situations like this must occur.

~~~
alistairSH
These situations absolutely occur. Something like this happened to me in
Alexandria, VA, trying to cross the Woodrow Wilson bridge into MD. I-495 was
slow across the bridge. Waze re-directed me off the interstate into
residential side streets, along with thousands of other travelers. The side-
streets were every bit as jammed as the highway. It took me 3 hours to
disentangle myself from that mess. Was it faster than staying on the highway?
No idea, but 3 hours to cover 5 miles is terrible - the app should have just
said "You're fucked, go home and try again tomorrow." instead of constantly
telling me "oh hey, try this other side street, it'll save you 45 minutes!"

~~~
danesparza
I would pay good money for the "go home and try again tomorrow" feature.
Especially if it was narrated by my favorite celebrity. Like Cookie Monster.

~~~
thrownblown
You can get cookie monster's voice on Waze...

~~~
danesparza
Oh, I'm aware. Thanks though. ;-)

------
nudgeee
I used to work for a mapping & navigation company that offered a traffic API
service. It worked by using anonymized cell phone data to predict traffic
patterns. I once heard a story that during peak hour, every five minutes or so
the jams on a highway would magically disappear then reappear. After some head
scratching, turns out there is a train track inbetween the lanes of the
highway full of high speed commuters that would cancel out the stationary car
commuters.

~~~
onionisafruit
How did you fix that? I’ve been wondering how google and the others
differentiate between cars on the free vs express lanes.

~~~
labcomputer
You can measure peak acceleration--cars accelerate much faster than buses or
trains--or whether you're connected to headphones (not a head-unit). Use of
headphones by drivers is illegal in most places.

As for express vs. regular lanes, express-lane cars will have much different
distributions than regular-lane cars. Use something like KNN where the
distance metric is a weighted sum of Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between speed
distributions and K-S between acceleration distributions (each vehicle is one
unit with a distribution of speeds and accelerations).

~~~
andrewzah
> or whether you're connected to headphones

I’m pretty sure this is rarely enforced in most states in the US. My father
frequently drives across the US and always takes his calls with earbuds
because the speakers aren’t very good.

I do it with one earbud in because I find the quality of speaker audio
terrible, forcing me to concentrate harder on it to discern what’s being said.

~~~
brewdad
Single ear devices are usually legal where earbuds in both ears is not.
Maintaining situational awareness seems to be the rule. If course, I'm
essentially deaf in on ear, so being legal isn't any safer.

I tend to use the car speakers or simply refuse all incoming calls while
driving.

~~~
reroute1
> simply refuse all incoming calls while driving

Definitely the best course of action. Even just talking on the phone is very
distracting. No way someone can have a full conversation going and still be
giving the same attention to driving.

------
wh1t3n01s3
A similar problem happens during unusual big snowfalls in the country or in
the mountains. The primary roads turn red because the cars are going really
slow cz there is 50cm of snow. So maps redirects you to secondary roads, where
there is nobody and even more snow.

~~~
OmarShehata
We got hit by a surprise blizzard once (driving from North Dakota to
Minnesota, where it went from no trace of snow to blizzard in about 20 minutes
of driving). Our car couldn't really make it up any road that wasn't well
plowed.

I was trying to navigate to a hotel because I knew we couldn't make it back in
this weather, but all the closest hotels weren't on main roads. I was
desperately trying to figure out a way to tell Google "prefer main roads" so
we could find a hotel that was several miles further away if that meant
sticking to safer roads.

I thought a lot about how a feature like that could save lives in an
emergency. Does this already exist anywhere?

~~~
dingaling
> Does this already exist anywhere?

Of course, any basic offline routing application that doesn't have live
traffic feed. Something like Osmand for example.

It's an interesting example of over-optimisation causing unforeseen effects.
Perhaps better to rely on naive basic routing combined with external traffic
condition prompts instead.

~~~
gambiting
I wonder if you could quickly save offline maps for the area you're in and
then kill the GSM connection. So you could still navigate but without traffic
information.

~~~
robbiep
Yes you can do this with google maps - have been able for a couple of years.
Hit the hamburger then ‘offline maps’ and it will download your geographic
region. Great for international travel as it will still pathfind

------
AlexandrB
Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough"
mediocrity. In addition to the "red but no traffic" problems highlighted by
others I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in
areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm
doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10
minutes". Additionally:

* I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map. E.g. driving vs. walking vs. transit.

* There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.

* Multi-destination route optimization is not available. E.g. I need to go to the mall, the grocery store, and the bank, what's the sequence of destinations and route that minimizes travel time.[1]

Edit: [1] I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but
for small (<=4) _n_ it should not be too difficult while still being useful in
practice.

~~~
herenorthere
>There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy
streets.

Woah, I've never heard anyone else mention this problem. It sounds strange
having it said "out loud" because I thought it was just a weird personal
quirk/irritation of mine.

I have always wished there was a route option of "easy mode driving," or "no
pressure route."

Often the "quickest" route google maps shows me is one that has some sort of
difficult turn across multiple lanes going the other direction into a "suicide
lane" or what have you.

Either that, of some sort of merging is necessary where you're basically at
the mercy of other drivers letting you in (especially tough if you're not an
aggressive driver like myself).

Honestly, some maneuvers give me a lot of anxiety, like when I'm on a very
busy two lane road (no middle lane) and google is telling me to turn left, so
I have to sit there with my blinker on feeling terrible for pissing off all
the drivers that are now pilling up behind me, while I anxiously wait for an
opening.

Unless Im late for something important, I'd gladly go 5 minutes or more out of
my way not to experience that kind of driving pressure/social anxiety. I have
a moderate anxiety disorder so I know this might not be normal.

But you're absolutely right! I suppose it does in fact boil down to just
having a route option with "no left turns" \-- I had never thought of it that
way. That's such a simple way to solve 95% of the problem.

\----

Edit: a left turn lane, with a green left turn light is totally fine.

Edit 2: For the handful of caring but misguided people scrutinizing my
aversion for left turns:

>Federal data have shown that 53.1 percent of crossing-path crashes involve
left turns, but only 5.7 percent involve right turns.

sauce: 2001 - Analysis of Crossing Path Crashes - NHTSA

~~~
deathhand
Fed ex avoids left turns -
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/04/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/04/09/the-
case-for-almost-never-turning-left-while-driving/?arc404=true)

~~~
OnlineGladiator
It's also a serious consideration for companies working on self-driving cars,
as unprotected left turns are extremely difficult for the robots.

~~~
ufmace
Not too surprising if we think about it. At a significant number of
unprotected lefts at busy intersections, you basically have to semi-
aggressively pull out in front of oncoming traffic and rely on them to slow
down for you in order to get through in a reasonable time. It's tough to
automate that in a safe way. Especially if it involves fuzzy value judgements
about whether those cars seem like they'll probably slow down for you.

------
WilTimSon
Wow, I never actually stopped to think about the way Google determines traffic
but it seems so obvious now. This is a very simple but cool trick, I'd expect
to see something like this in an action movie where people need to reroute an
important car to a particular street.

Anyone have any idea how often this data is updated? So if the guy runs
through a street with a cart and it turns red, when will it show up as clear?

~~~
ody4242
I guess an important piece (conveniently left out of this story) is that it
does not work if there are other cars on the road, as these cars quickly
invalidate the data coming from the slow cart.

~~~
matz1
But wouldn't that other car be classified as error?

~~~
matmo
I don't know what the tipping point is, but it'd probably take more than one.
I've commuted through backed up/stopped/solid red sections on a motorcycle
where I just get to lane-split and cruise through, and it'd still stay red.

~~~
mayniac
I think Google uses phone sensors to tell motorbikes apart form cars. Pretty
simple tech: cars don't lean.

Which makes it all the more infuriating that Google Maps still has huge flaws
when it comes to motorbike navigation.

~~~
c0restraint
> I think Google uses phone sensors to tell motorbikes apart form cars

While they could, I doubt they do... do you have evidence of this?

~~~
shric
not the GP, and I don't how it's done, but my Google Maps timeline does
distinguish between motorcycling and car trips, however its reliability is
questionable. It has often mis-categorised my motorcycle trips as car trips,
but rarely if ever the reverse.

I would guess (unsubstantiated) that it classifies a motorcycle trip as being
unexpectedly fast through many traffic jams.

~~~
dwild
They are pretty good to identify public transit from cars too.

------
maxtollenaar
Google maps and other navigational apps could potentially flood residential
routes that weren't supposed to handle traffic. People have done different
measures to combat this. One anecdote is: "And in 2016, in Takoma Park,
Maryland, residents went to great lengths to prevent Waze drivers from
flooding their roads during a bridge reconstruction project. A Takoma Park man
reportedly started reporting phantom wrecks and traffic jams on his street
before Waze banned him" ref: [https://www.usnews.com/news/national-
news/articles/2018-05-0...](https://www.usnews.com/news/national-
news/articles/2018-05-07/why-some-cities-have-had-enough-of-waze)

------
nateburke
This is a hack in an older, juvenile sense of the word, the sense that found
cars on top of MIT buildings and football fans holding up cards that spell "we
suck" in aggregate.

I might be getting older but "hack" these days seems to just mean "go to work"
or even "go to work on the weekend".

~~~
capableweb
> older, juvenile sense of the word

Eh, alright. What's then the "hack" definition that is younger and more adult?

In my mind, hack has always been the same. Clever thing that does what you
want. That's it.

~~~
konceptz
Didn’t look it up for source but I thought hacking was coined by model train
enthusiasts, “hacking” together train sets.

------
mindfulhack
This video is a bit of a seminal moment for me. It's made me realise the
information and tools we rely on and assume are true are actually just
systematic fabrications produced by self-serving corporations, and are not
necessarily the truth whatsoever.

What does this mean for Google Search?

(We had this discussion the other day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22139421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22139421))

~~~
stevenhuang
What a predictably cynical interpretation. Your immediate reaction to the
application of imperfect models to the real world need not be one of distrust
as if slighted but rather simple acknowledgment that this is just the best we
can currently do.

~~~
mindfulhack
You have a point. Perhaps it's Google users' fault as much as anyone else's,
to form such trusting emotional bonds to the Google service in the first
place. However:

1\. Google doesn't do anything to educate their users about this reality. 2\.
If corporations like Google really wanted to do "the best we can currently
do", they'd try harder but instead they just do "the best we need to do to
make billions of dollars from collecting people's data."

Case in point, turns out Yandex image search is better than Google's. Google
won't try harder if no one knows there's something better.

~~~
dwild
> Google really wanted to do "the best we can currently do", they'd try harder

Trying harder what? Trying harder to avoid showing traffic when someone with
99 phones in a cart wheel is walking in the street?

They are doing the best they can, the kind of traffic they are showing is
quite close to reality in pretty much any situation.

------
sunflowerfly
This happens a lot when driving around on smaller highways in rural areas here
in the US. We even joke when we see red on the map; is it a real slowdown or
did the one driver with Google Maps slow down to pass a tractor?

------
jpindar
The author has a twitter thread about this:
[https://twitter.com/simon_deliver/status/1223569659645112320](https://twitter.com/simon_deliver/status/1223569659645112320)

------
stiray
Has anyone tried using Maps? I don't think it solves the left turn problem,
but I am extremly unhappy with google maps interface and pushing of ads. After
a bit of searching I have found Maps and never turned back. Well, I hope it
comes handy to someone else too...

[https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/)

~~~
dddw
tried, didn't work. I use osmand, altough it works fine for regular
navigation, it's kinda slow and eats all my batteries. i'm givin nokia maps
(here maps) a second chance

------
rosybox
That 10px font size is not accessible. I can't read what's there without
zooming in. It looked like decorative text or legal disclosures for a contest
or something. Did the site's creator find that the ideal text size to use?

~~~
mihaaly
Never mind, there is no real content in the text just empty phrases.

------
flarg
I'm sure I've seen a related effect where a clear road is red until I drive
down it and it then turns green

~~~
copperx
Much better than the more common scenario of driving to work with an all green
route and then finding that traffic is at a standstill. And then seconds later
Google Maps marks the road as red. This happens so much that I don't trust all
green routes to work anymore.

------
philshem
This gives a new meaning to the maxim "You are not stuck in traffic. You are
traffic."

~~~
copperx
"I'm sorry boss, I'm going to be late because I'm traffic."

------
unfundiert
I'm stunned how fast Google Maps detects traffic jams. I assume all those
smartphones are running car navigation and as traffic detection works by
trusting the clients I fear there's no chance to avoid this kind of exploit.
Nevertheless it would be interesting to know what's the ratio of correct /
malicious clients to fool the system. That migt highly depend on whether
Google implemented any detection of faulty clients.

~~~
asutekku
Google maps runs also a lot of the time on background so no active navigation
is required. I wonder if the introduction of background location activity
notifications in iOS 13 decreased the amount of traffic data gathered from
iPhone users.

~~~
CrazyCatDog
I want one app to track my position at all times. I use google because I’m
unaware of another—and I figure they have optimized the energy consumption of
doing so. Then again, would be thrilled if someone could recommend an
alternate way of doing this on iOS (preferably native).

PS this function allowed me to time stamp my location which proved incredibly
helpful in a FOFA request with state patrol—got me out of a ticket that should
never have been issued!

~~~
mattivc
I use an app called Arc for this: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arc-app-
location-activity/id10...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arc-app-location-
activity/id1063151918)

I am pretty happy with it, so i can recommend giving it a try.

~~~
CrazyCatDog
EXACTLY what I was looking for, thank you!

------
joantune
From my last experience circa 1/2 years ago, you just need to be the only one
on the road. About that time I was driving up at odd hours on a highway, when
I noticed a yellow stretch on google maps coming up. Turns out the highway was
mostly empty, and the only other vehicle in the road was a truck, which is
limited to a fraction of the top speed.

------
duxup
I always wondered about that.

I don't think enough people use Google maps in my area for it to be consistent
much of the time.

Lots of random (not on map) or way out of date slowdows. The reporting feature
doesn't seem to do much.

Granted otherwise it is a great app, and I don't pretend to have the solutions
to the wonkyness, just wonky at times when it comes to identifying traffic
issues.

~~~
Frost1x
In many locations your Uber/Lyft drivers are farming a lot of fairly reliable
data for Google Maps (and Waze).

~~~
duxup
That would make sense as far as the area's I'm thinking of are along the burgs
outer ring roads so I don't think there is nearly as much outer ring Uber
action.

------
timthorn
The A14 north of Cambridge has recently been rerouted, and towards the end of
the project - but months before it opened - Bing maps showed green traffic
across countryside where the construction workers were moving along the new
road.

------
nateburke
I am wondering what the minimal monthly data plan cost would be to have this
working continuously on your street.

In a suburb, surely 20 phones would be enough, no? At $30/ month maybe
somewhere between 500 and 600 per month?

~~~
beefield
I guess you do not need a data plan. Or even phones. Just spin up n android
emulators and spoof them with the gps data you want? (Disclaimer: I fully
expect that to break multiple TOS clauses so I take no responsibility
whatsoever if anyone tries this one.)

~~~
copperx
It's a bit naive to think that Google doesn't have a filtering rule that says
"only consider real phones with a true GPS signal".

~~~
beefield
This may be a bit naive question, but how does Google know that the virtual
phone is not a real phone and the signal is not true? In a way that is not
spoofable?

~~~
jtsiskin
They can likely consider only 1 device per IP address. Unless the region is
blanketed in strong public WiFi

~~~
beefield
I thought NAT was widespread with mobile providers making that difficult?

------
k2xl
Seems like someone who is malicious could spin up a bunch of VMs, spoof their
gps as slow moving across various streets to simulate traffic jams. Even
sophisticated spoofing would have hard time detecting this.

You could even do the inverse, simulate no traffic but have virtual cars go
through streets faster than usual even if there is a traffic jam!

Would we have some major impacts in the economy of an area if major highways
are simulated at high traffic earlier/later than usual over the course of many
days?

Could affect local city transportation budgets to build or not build roads/new
streets if they base their data solely on analytics coming from Google.

Bots have become more and more sophisticated, so niche types of manipulation
is harder to detect, and for something like GPS you can't really prompt a
RECAPTCHA before routes are used.

Cell phone tower data probably doesn't suffer from this risk as much, since
you have to pay for cellular data and spoofing data to cell towers is probably
more difficult.

------
alien1993
Would it be possible to do this by using the Android emulator and simulate its
position?

------
maitredusoi
I am happy to realize that it is Artistically possible to disrupt Google Map

------
EGreg
We hacked Google's maps to make a web-based "GPS" system, like the navigation
on the phone. It's not perfect, but it allows us to do things like have the
driver share their geolocation in the Web browser, without putting it in the
background, and without downloading any native apps.

I'd say very little in the Qbix Platform is hacked together, but this is one
of those things. It's not in the core, we have it in the Travel plugin. You
can see it here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Q7IzVv1VU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Q7IzVv1VU)

Here's a list of all the features:
[https://qbix.com/features.pdf](https://qbix.com/features.pdf)

Here is the overview of the whole open source platform in case you're curious:
[https://qbix.com/platform](https://qbix.com/platform)

------
chairmanwow1
Why is his face blurred in the photos, but not in the video (or the video
thumbnail for that matter)?

------
MattGrommes
I can't wait until some rich neighbors get together to buy a bunch of phones
to use this to keep people off "their" streets. I'm sure there will be some
startup selling this service in parts of the Bay Area in no time.

------
vool
This paper (2013) might be of interest "We demonstrate in practice how hackers
can take control of navigation systems and, in the case of a wide distribution
of floating car data, can actively control the traffic flow."

[https://media.blackhat.com/eu-13/briefings/Jeske/bh-
eu-13-fl...](https://media.blackhat.com/eu-13/briefings/Jeske/bh-
eu-13-floating-car-data-jeske-wp.pdf)

------
shric
I'd love a motorcycle mode aka "ignore traffic", in states/jurisdictions where
lane filtering/splitting is allowed. I don't want to have to go offline to
avoid it taking into account current traffic.

~~~
t413
+1 agreed– just a toggles for 'disable traffic optimization' and 'prefer 2+
lane roads' would do the trick.

I'm definitely adding a pretty bad outlier to real-time traffic data about
stopped traffic.. Very similar to what this cute hack is doing.

------
H8crilA
This is really no different than spammy SEO in web documents.

One can only imagine the accuracy of virtual Android simulators running fake
GPS and Google Maps if there was money to be made on fooling the traffic
analysis.

------
matchagaucho
Sounds like a good interview question for Google.

 _" Given GPS and cell tower location data, how do you prevent a false
positive traffic jam when 99 phones are all within 1M of each other?"_

------
Santosh83
Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other and report it to
Maps, which would then presumably figure out that they're too close to
represent separate vehicles?

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Just a guess: there's little economic incentive to perform this attack, and it
would also be pretty expensive to perform regularly. So detecting and
preventing it has not been a priority up to now. If people started doing it
regularly, I'm sure countermeasures would be put in place.

~~~
vongomben
Why expensive? If you compare it with other forms of rioting and strike I
think is still cheap. Ghost digital crowd.

BTW I wonder if you really need 99 different data Sims cards or rather have a
smartphone hotspotting every 5.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Expensive in time compared to benefit accrued/harm done. At a minimum you have
to spend a person's time on it, both in the gathering of a bunch of used
phones, the setting up of many phone lines, and the actual work of walking on
the street. A small street seeming busy on Google Maps doesn't really matter
that much. Especially, if the street is not actually busy, since that's kind
of an indicator that people don't really want to use it anyway. So the amount
of traffic you'd potentially divert is similarly small.

This seems really obvious to me, so if it doesn't seem that way to you, maybe
we just have different priors. I can't explain it any better than this,
though.

~~~
wtracy
It doesn't strike me as particularly expensive compared to getting thirty-plus
bicyclists to go down the street in a block like the Critical Mass activists
do.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Critical mass tends to target busy city streets, partly perhaps with the goal
of causing actual congestion. I daresay it wouldn't serve as much of a protest
if the entire goal were making Google maps look worse.

------
kehphin
Does anyone else get a bit of unexpected joy when they drive through a section
of ‘red’ road without any actual traffic? It makes me feel like I saved a bit
of time in my life.

------
newtonapple
I drove through North Lake Tahoe one time on a weekday around midnight, and
Google Maps was showing all red as I was driving up the mountain... I was
super confused as there were no cars around me and it was not snowing either.
What I later realized was that all the trucks were parked alongside the
freeway taking breaks... I never realized that you could basically trick
Google Maps by using a bunch of cellphones. Very neat!

------
speedgoose
I wonder whether Google Maps takes into account the various ways of
transportation, such as bicycles, public transports, or electric cars driving
on the bus lines.

~~~
blfr
Yes, if you look in your Google Maps timeline it can even often guess which
mode of transportation you used.

~~~
judge2020
Might be via the phone sensors more then GPS travel insights -

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotio...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotionactivity)

------
scarejunba
I imagine that if this is widespread they'll be able to use spam-filtering
style stuff to get data from reliable accounts like mine (lots of reviews,
location history on for decades, etc.) to override this stuff.

An interesting reminder that all crowdsourced data does suffer from operating
in an adversarial space. Wikipedia to Traffic.

------
threatofrain
I expect Google to start weighing user data by some notion of account
credibility. It’s a problem that extends beyond maps.

~~~
tomaskafka
They can start with reviews, where this is much more important and commonly
misused thing - and they still don't care. At all. So, nope :).

------
ChuckMcM
This is a pretty cool hack. I can see neighborhood watch groups using it to
keep Waze from routing people down their streets during rush hour.

It is also a nice demonstration of how people who understand automation can
"work the system" in ways that people who don't understand automation cannot.

------
mercwear
Simple yet interesting experiment and the type of content that keeps me coming
back to HN. Nice work OP.

------
jasoneckert
I never thought it'd be possible, but this blog post made me actually want to
buy 99 smartphones.

------
brenden2
Cool, could use something like this to keep traffic off my street until all
the devices are banned.

~~~
chapium
Imagine a cyclist using this to reduce traffic being routed to roads they are
travelling on.

------
oxfordmale
I wonder if there are other non-ethical commercial purposes for this.

For example, could shops use it to inflate their footfall and make them look
busier than they are ?

Can you think of any other areas where this hack could be used for non-ethical
purposes ?

~~~
robkop
Not sure exactly how rideshare prices are calculated but say you're picking
someone up on a street -- you could potentially make a fake traffic jam on the
street so that the app would calculate a longer route and hence pay you more.

------
fludlight
Check out the rest of this artist’s portfolio, some of them are quite good.

[http://www.simonweckert.com/work.html](http://www.simonweckert.com/work.html)

------
hosanex
Please thing I never understood was there app insisting on this is still the
fastest route. As if it's supposed to be anything else when you searched for
the fastest route to start with.

~~~
kaikai
Traffic could have started after you began your journey, making another route
without traffic faster.

------
maxerickson
How does the cellular network location sharing work? Would it be possible to
use 1 radio to spoof multiple devices there, or is there going to be enough
security to prevent that?

------
a3n
Jammers!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Your_Funeral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Your_Funeral)

------
dghughes
Geez, those second-hand phones look nicer than what I am using now :(

edit: And why wouldn't a bus with 50 people all with smartphones have the same
effect?

~~~
great_kraken
The people on the bus wouldn't be in car navigation mode of Google Maps.

~~~
dghughes
I don't think everyone has to be using car navigation mode. The traffic in my
small town is shown on Google Traffic and I doubt locals here need navigation
to get back to their home 5km away.

------
Jamwinner
Went back to using maps, with a quick glance at traffic cameras in problem
spots, it gets me there faster, and with _less distraction_.

------
antidamage
Just one hack. Not really worthy of the plural.

------
aussieguy1234
Hostile residents who don't like car traffic through their neighbourhoods
might do this to keep cars out of their streets.

------
irrlichthn
Very cool hack. Thought about that this could be possible several times now,
nice that someone actually did and succeeded :)

------
londons_explore
Do the phones have to be open and navigating somewhere,or is it enough for
them to just be idle on the home screen?

~~~
myself248
My understanding is this:

If it was only phones running Maps, they wouldn't get much data.

Phones running Maps are actively using the GPS, so they provide more precise
data. Those sitting idle just get tower location, which helps fill in some
vague flow information but doesn't do much for specific street or momentary
speed.

~~~
allannienhuis
> Those sitting idle just get tower location

Do you have links or google keyword hints to more information about that? Is
that OS specific?

~~~
londons_explore
The GPS hardware is pretty power hungry, so is normally only switched on
rarely for short bursts unless the user is actively navigating.

You can see that with `adb logcat` on an android phone.

------
Nition
> Google’s map service has fundamentally changed our understanding of what a
> map is ... and how they look aesthetically.

Paper maps used to look like a diagrammatic network of streets, with pale
background and yellow for main roads, and our fundamental understanding of
what a map is, was that it was a tool for navigation.

Now with Google Maps, maps look like ??? and our fundamental understanding of
what a map is, is ???.

~~~
jmpeax
Google Maps is not a tool for navigation, it is a tool to sell advertising to
businesses. The same way a pig farm is not a b&b for pigs.

------
xxxxxxxx
Police roadblocks to test for drugs and alcohol (aka booze bus) also show up
as red on google maps.

------
n-gauge
Cool trick - I wonder how much of the cell tower's capacity he is hogging too?

~~~
sudhirj
No more than two buses, it's only a 100 phones.

------
z3t4
Another fun thing you can do is to write messages to those who study hot maps.

------
art_loving_nerd
To me, this is not so much about Google Maps or even "hacking" a computer
system, but rather about how and how much computer information systems shape
our view of reality, and how fake news may be created simply by naive and/or
buggy software. It's just that in this case the big gap between view and
reality can easily be shown by some photos or a simple video, while in case of
search engines or recommendation systems, or advertising, it is much harder to
show. To me this is kind of a "the emperor is naked" moment for surveillance
capitalism, and even more so, as it is that simple.

------
yjl001
very good article. Thanks for sharing this.

------
shubidubi
it's not a bug, it's a feature.

------
lonelappde
Google/Android fights this sort of abuse by making short lifetimes for
smartphones, so adversary can't accumulate many working secondhand phones, or
Google can detect and filter them by obsolete OS version :-D

