Buttu, who regularly travels to the West Bank city of Ramallah from her home in Haifa, Israel, for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has repeatedly led her astray in recent years. “I was told to run straight into a wall that has been erected since 2003,” she says.
Others encountered the same wall near the Qalandia checkpoint that separates Jerusalem from the West Bank, and entering it almost by car became a sort of rite of passage. “One day I was trying to get to an office in a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and Google Maps completely failed me,” says Leila, who works for an American company remotely from Ramallah and asked use only their first name for confidentiality reasons. . “He wanted me to take a route completely cut off by the wall.”
Google’s Bourdeau told WIRED that the company is studying the route and will provide an update if it can verify the situation against reliable data.
Even before the war, Google Maps users in the West Bank say they were accustomed to receiving potentially dangerous directions. A persistent problem they point out is the fact that Google does not distinguish between unregulated roads and those permitted for use only by Israelis, such as those leading to and from Israeli settlements where Palestinians are not. supposed to go. On the road from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps once directed Buttu to a closed gate where, she said, Israeli soldiers approached her car, their guns pointed at her. “I had to explain that I had made a mistake,” she said. Google “optimizes traffic on settler roads, which for me as a Palestinian can be very dangerous.”
Bourdeau says Google does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes because that would require knowing personal information about users, such as their citizenship.
When Google Maps takes her to the settlements, Buttu says she speaks English in hopes of appearing like a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly find themselves in risky areas, they try to turn around or go back as quickly as possible.
In other cases, Google Maps completely refuses to provide directions, such as when navigating between West Bank cities including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the app tells them it “could not calculate driving directions.” (WIRED was able to reproduce the same result.) One of Google’s current employees says it’s because Google hasn’t invested in directions that provide connections between the three West Bank administrative areas, two of which are officially more controlled by the Israeli authorities. Bourdeau, the Google spokesperson, says the company is working to resolve the issue.
New challenges
Despite its drawbacks, users tell WIRED that they still found Google Maps useful in the area, especially when traveling to unfamiliar places. But since the start of the war, they believe that the application has become unbearable. Shortly after the fighting began, Google removed the ability to preview live traffic in the region. protect “the safety of local communities.” Users now have to enter a specific location to see traffic conditions along their route, potentially adding an extra step for some of them.
Two current Google employees also claim that due to changing conditions on the ground during the war and the increase in spam that tends to follow conflicts, Google did not follow through on many of the changes suggested by employees and drivers in the West Bank, who are alerting. the tech giant has issues like missing streets or locations. This has made the app’s road data obsolete over the past year. Bourdeau says Google applies updates when suggestions can be verified with reliable sources.
