An artist named Simon Weckert used a cart full of 99 different phones to create a fake traffic jam on Google Maps in Berlin, according to WIRED.
How to went down: Weckert rented or borrowed 99 Android phones and loaded them into a wagon. He opened each of the phones to Google Maps and walked down a street in Berlin.
- Doing so created a fake traffic jam on Google Maps about an hour later.
- Thick red lines showed up on Google Maps even though there weren’t any cars there.
- Weckert said: “99 smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route!”
- Weckert told Motherboard: “Data is always translated to what they might be presented. The images, lists, graphs, and maps that represent those data are all interpretations, and there is no such thing as neutral data. Data is always collected for a specific purpose, by a combination of people, technology, money, commerce and government.”
A Google spokesperson told 9to5 Google: “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.”