Google Maps Hacks (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps Hacks (2020)

simonweckert.com

150 pointsMrNosy40 comments

Around the time this fake traffic jam project was first performed, a friend of mine was working on a condo development that was just about ready to list for sale. They planned an open house. The property itself was very nice and successfully delivered. However, there was a problem.

The property was very convenient to a local highway without being so close that it experienced noise/traffic/primary exposure to exhaust, etc. Google Maps would reliably take people on this highway and to the same exit. From that exit, locals would go one way that was a nice, quiet drive through some residential parts of town. But Maps would take you a different way, a detour down a side street with a public housing project that often presented an open air drug market, and was the site of not infrequent shooting deaths.

Presumably Maps sent you that way because the other direct way was the way most people took, and so this detour had less traffic and was marginally faster. This street was some distance from the condo project, but it would still give people a certain impression of the neighborhood that the developer felt was unfair.

I sent them the linked writeup hoping they would try it, but they never did as far as I know. Also, I'm not sure how well-received someone walking down this street with a bunch of phones in a wagon would be.

> Also, I'm not sure how well-received someone walking down this street with a bunch of phones in a wagon would be.

Considering your story, the phones will certainly be well received ;)

>Also, I'm not sure how well-received someone walking down this street with a bunch of phones in a wagon would be.

Is there any way you could just have a single laptop running hundreds of Android simulators? You could just fake the location as well with some jitter.

> walking down this street with a bunch of phones in a wagon

They could always be thrown in the back of a car, and you can drive slowly down the street, possibly jumping from parked spots on the side if there's light traffic you would be interrupting if you stayed in the street and went too slow.

I wonder if there's people that you can hire that are already set up to do this in large metro areas. It's crazy what you find people doing for side hustles when you look sometimes.

How does Google Maps handle a bus or other transit? You could have 50 people, all starting and stopping every 100m, like it's bumper-to-bumper traffic. I suppose they don't all have Google Maps open but it could be reporting anyway. People don't need Navigation for the daily commute to work yet highways show up red just the same.

They know where buses go usually, so if a point is going along a road that a bus isn't going on would be one idea. Another would be a flag identifying if a user has a car, and clustering of similar points together to identify a bus, also I imagine bus stops generate a pattern different subtle or obvious from normal traffic jam?

But how is the article's wagon o' phones different from a bus? How does Google know if my 1 week old Google account has a car?

I just had another thought. The Boston area has been rolling out bus lanes and they're pretty fantastic. However, a crowded rush hour bus may have a perverse effect on their traffic jam calculations. Where normal cars will be at a stand still, Google will also see ~50 users absolutely flying down the road in comparison. What happens then?

>How does Google know if my one week old Google account has a car?

I am being serious when I say this: they probably do. I get that comes off as “haha tongue in cheek we’re all being spied on amirite!?” but I imagine google can and does figure that stuff out very, very quickly. Plus most people aren’t just entering the google ecosystem for the first time with their new phone.

Well I don't know, but I'd have a guess as to how they might easily do it. Pattern recognition and/or machine learning. Something like: here is what the pattern of a user moving through space when they are in a car. Here are a million other ones. Here is a pattern of a user walking through space, taking a bus, etc etc. Now here is an unknown user. What pattern of movement does this user match closest to?

A pattern would be, for example: is he ever seen moving more than 5mph? Does he use driving directions? Is he only seen moving faster along bus routes? If he is only seen along bus routes does his pattern of moving and stopping align with the bus stops? Is there usually traffic jams at the same time of the week on different days, etc.

Just build up a database of patterns and check a 1 week old account with that to see what it fits best.

Perhaps in an area with no predictable traffic and no bus routes, that a wagon of phone matches the pattern of a traffic jam caused by a blockage on a road. It's less likely to be a bus, perhaps?

I expect a road is considered blocked up if its throughput has changed lower relative to normal. Normal bus traffic and normal car traffic don't trigger the alert, but if a wagon of phones rolls through very slow, that will sway the algo.

It's unlikely that 50 users on a bus all have Google Maps open at the same time.

Most people don’t disable background tracking or bother closing an app when they’re done with it, so while it’s unlikely all 50 are, it’s very possible many have had it open in the background for days (if not weeks).

the phones in the pictures are in navigation mode. maybe they are weighted differently?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216821

Oh that's really useful, thanks for sharing.

It can be seen on the video that the guy with the cart is often passed by cars.

From the point of view of Gmaps, surely if one phone can travel at 40mph+ through a street then it's not clogged, even if a whole pack of other phones seem to be stuck at a very low speed?

(The one passing car would have to be connected to Gmaps as well, of course.)

San Francisco is often clogged, with motorcyclists lane splitting and therefore travelling at significantly higher speeds compared to others. I'm sure median speed gives a better approximation of actual thruput than top speed.

Have you ever been in a traffic jam and seen cars taking the shoulder to pass everyone and exit? Google would need to listen to the masses and ignore the few breaking the law.

I saw this happen in real life the other day on a recent trip to home depot. Saw someone walking down the road on my way into the store. On the way out I noticed gmaps reported a very quiet behind-the-store road as red, with heavy traffic, presumably the single person walking created the jam.

This happened when I was lost in St Louis. I pulled off the highway to a side street to check google maps, and maps reported red traffic at midnight in front of the empty parking lot of a closed business campus.

This post went viral back in 2020. I remember seeing it when he first did this using the wagon.

This actually was inspiration for a new "service" that's out there now, which is not publicized that much (because of obvious reasons).

There person running the service bought over 100 iPhones. They use Team Viewer to control all of them. The 100+ phones connect to 5 different hotspots, for internet access. They open up Google Maps on each phone and set the driving directions to a certain local business (the business paying for the service). Then, they literally drive to the business with all of the phones. This gets the business better Google Maps rankings, since it's "popular". Also, reviews are left using some of the accounts, as well as photos.

Oh really? Wow! Do you have a post you can share about that?

I wonder if it would also work with virtualized Android devices with fake locations

Be right back, turning this into a SaaS for people who want to avoid traffic :)

You'd have to figure out how to get Google GMS installed, and bypass their virtualization/emulator detection. Doable, but a bit more than just boot up some emulators.

I was about to mention the same thing. Why not spin up a serverfarm of virtual androids and spoof the GPS to slowly move through a specific street.

only one way to find out :)

What about buses?

Did they identify traffic jam with the number of devices or the speed?

Google travel mode detection is pretty good about distinguishing between a car and a bus or train. I don't know if it comes from sensor data or radio data but Google reliably distinguishes between transit and car trips on my location history, whether I was carrying my iPhone or my Android. It also sometimes prompts me for "how crowded is/was the bus" when and only when I was riding a bus. This is an improvement over past behavior where Android would remind me where I parked ... the bus I rode earlier. I don't think current Google Maps will confuse a crowded bus and a traffic jam.

Written in 2020

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Try going this way instead https://radical-openness.org/en/vortragende/simon-weckert

i think this would be a great business. get real estate agents or HOAs to pay you to hack the maps to divert traffic away from neighborhoods

we once lived in a quiet neighborhood in West LA . once wayze became popular, the traffic exploded and it was constantly noisy to the point i was wearing earplugs indoors all day.

technology is efficient but not always beneficial

What's the point of this? It's not clever or useful and could cause people to waste time and gas getting re-routed. It's no different than spamming a forum or website.

It does at least draw attention to some of the fairly flaky algorithms and assumptions that people are perhaps naively relying on. I’m not a fan of the race to the bottom to automate at the expense of accuracy that Google so often exemplifies.

Assuming enough people use Google Maps to navigate, this could be a good way to get yourself some clean roads. You'd basically be a virtual stampedo.

google can detect an Amish person in the horse-drawn carriage, reliably, by the small decrease in speed, and the slight "moving over" in the lane, by the deluge of barely-affected traffic.

The red dot drudges along blissfully ignorant, unaware of its existence in the virtual, ethereal plane.

This doesn't work on busy roads

Google is an spyware company, which invades our privacy. It needs to be avoided at all cost. I always encourage people to use Amazon or MS products.

> Google is an spyware company, which invades our privacy. It needs to be avoided at all cost.

Yep. Totally agreed.

> I always encourage people to use Amazon or MS products.

Oh dear...

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