Simon Weckert took 99 phones, put them in a cart and created a fake traffic jams on Google Maps. Apparently, this is how easily you can troll technology that we use and sometimes depend on.
The artist, wheeled the cart loaded with 99 phones that had Google Maps open, around the streets of Berlin for his experiment. The phones moving slowly fooled the Google Maps into thinking that a lot of people navigating were very slow, due to heavy traffic.
As a result of this, the green roads that show empty traffic turned into red, which means heavy traffic congestion.
Weckert showed his experiment on a YouTube video that you can see below.
How does Google Maps understand there is traffic?
Google Maps receives, analyzes the data from its users such as their location, their direction and their speed. Then the AI interpretes these data and generates the final map in real time.
Weckert’s experiment shows that these systems can still be easily fooled. Google did not officially comment on the circumstance but a senior software engineer from Google tweeted about it.
Torrey Hoffman from Google, tweeted a confirming message that creating fake traffic jams on Google Maps with this method would be possible.
https://twitter.com/torreyh/status/1224032739713634305
On the other hand, being open to such methods might create serious situations. A stunt like this might cause people to lose time going on their businesses let alonje ambulances to divert from their ways causing much more damage than one can presume.
