Source: BGR.com
Google Maps received a ton of new features last year. In 2019 alone, Google Maps received an incognito mode that lets you unlink some location data from your primary Google account, and started replicating Google’s other popular navigation app, Waze. Google Maps now supports some of the incident reports that are so popular among Waze users, which could make Google Maps even better at dealing with real-life traffic. After all, Google already has the ability to offer real-time traffic data which doesn’t rely on crowdsourced information, as is the case for Waze incident reports. But it turns out that the feature can be hacked fairly easily. An artist loaded up Google Maps on 99 phones, placed them inside a cart, and then started walking the streets of Berlin, Germany while lugging the cart behind him. It turns out that running Google Maps fewer than 100 smartphones is enough to mess with Google’s algorithm and ruin everyone’s Google Maps experience for a few minutes. The whole experience was done in the name of art, but it also goes to show how one of Google Maps’ best features works — and, of course, how much location data Google can collect.
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