A German Artist Hacks Google Maps

Fake traffic jam on Google Maps? Yes, an German artist Simon Weckert recently found a way to create a fake traffic jam on Google Map Service.

The idea came up during the May Day demonstration in Berlin, when he realized that Google was registering a lot of traffic on the streets, even though there were no vehicles present. It turned out that the system was actually capturing location data from the crowd’s smartphones.

Weckert came up with a plan to simulate this process. He gather about 99 smartphones, load them to a cart and walk in the streets of Berlin pulling that cart. As expected, the traffic status of those streets turned to red in Google Maps.

As a respond to this situation Google spokesmen made a statement :

Whether via car or cart or camel, we love seeing creative uses of Google Maps as it helps us make maps work better over time.
Traffic data in Google Maps is refreshed continuously thanks to information from a variety of sources, including aggregated anonymized data from people who have location services turned on and contributions from the Google Maps community. We’ve launched the ability to distinguish between cars and motorcycles in several countries including India, Indonesia and Egypt, though we haven’t quite cracked traveling by wagon. We appreciate seeing creative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work better over time.
~ 9to5Google