A video has shown how one person was able to trick Google Maps into creating a traffic jam, with nothing more than a kart full of phones.
The experiment, which was filmed in Berlin, shows a man dragging 99 mobile phones across an empty bridge, alongside a real-time screen recording of Google Maps’ traffic feature.
Like magic, as the phones make their way across the bridge, the map gradually updates to show an orange, then a red line extending along the road. Within seconds, Google Maps has created a major jam in an otherwise traffic-free neighbourhood.
The idea behind the trick was to see if Google Maps could be conned into navigating real-world drivers to a different route, and it seems to have worked perfectly. That’s because rather than using cameras like typical traffic monitoring systems, Google’s real-time traffic alerts work by using GPS data from smartphones to work out how many cars are in an area at any given time.
The clip was first posted on YouTube by Simon Weckert, and people were suitably impressed by the con.
‘Wow what a hack, just realizing how Google maps works. You’re truly a genius,’ one person wrote, while another joked ‘Need to find the guy who does this in the 80% of the streets of my city.’
To be fair to Google, its a system that works most of the time, but this new video has shown that it’s not as exact a science as people might think.
