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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

It turns out, if you're creative enough, you can use one of the most common of childhood toys to make Google Maps display false real-time data. All you need is a little red wagon—and a hundred cheap smartphones.

The little red wagon full of phones is the idea of German artist Simon Weckert [simonweckert.com], whose projects focus on "hidden layers" in technology and examine the social and moral effects of the modern electronics-based lifestyle.

Google Maps determines congestion by gathering the location and motion speed of phones in a given area. Generally speaking, those phones are going to be in the road because they're with drivers, inside vehicles, and so measuring the phones' speed is a reasonably decent proxy for measuring vehicle speed. Those data points, aggregated, make a road look green on the map if traffic seems to be moving smoothly, or they look red on the map if traffic appears to be severe. When traffic is severe, the map's navigation software will reroute drivers around the congestion when possible.

The crowdsourced data system more or less seems to work for millions of drivers worldwide. Unless, of course, you generate a whole bunch of deliberately incorrect data, such as by piling 99 secondhand phones into a cart and moving at the speed of a walking human—between 2 and 4 miles per hour, on average—rather than at the speed of even a very slowly driving car. Then you can not only make a wide-open road appear blocked but keep it wide open even longer as cars reroute away from the supposed congestion.

Here is a YouTube video demonstrating the Google maps hack [youtube.com].

Original Submission