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Buttu, who regularly commutes to the West Bank city of Ramallah from his home in Haifa, Israel, for work and to see friends, says Google Maps has led him astray many times in recent years. He said: “I have been told to run the wall that has been built since 2003.
Others have encountered the same wall near the Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the West Bank, and the near-intrusion has become something of a ritual. “One time I tried to go to the office near East Jerusalem, and Google Maps failed me,” says Leila, who works for a US company far from Ramallah and asked to use only her first name for privacy reasons. . “It wanted me to go through the road that was cut by the wall.”
Google’s Bourdeau tells WIRED that the company is investigating the process and will make changes if it can validate the process against reliable data.
Even before the war, Google Maps users in the West Bank say they used to receive directions that could be unsafe. One persistent issue they point to is that Google doesn’t distinguish between off-limits roads and those that are allowed to be used by Israelis, such as those leading to and from Israel where Palestinians are not supposed to go. On the road from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps at one point pointed Buttu at a closed gate where he says Israeli soldiers approached his car with their guns pointed at him. He said: “I had to explain that I was wrong. Google “plans to go to residential streets, which for me as a Palestinian, can be very dangerous.”
Bourdeau says Google does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli channels, because it would want to know more about users, such as their citizens.
After Google Maps led him to the residence, Buttu says he spoke in English in the hope of passing as a lost tourist. Some Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly find themselves in dangerous situations, they try to turn around or go back as quickly as possible.
In some cases, Google Maps refuses to provide all directions, such as when traveling between West Bank cities, including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the program tells them that they “cannot calculate driving directions.” (WIRED was able to replicate the same results.) One current Google employee says that’s because Google didn’t spend money on transportation between the three control zones in the West Bank, two of which are controlled by Israeli authorities. Bourdeau, a Google spokesperson, says the company is working to fix the problem.
New Problems
Despite the difficulty, users tell WIRED that they still find Google Maps useful in this area, especially when traveling in unfamiliar areas. Since the start of the war, however, he feels that the program has become unbearable. As soon as the war started, Google shut down the ability to see an overview of the population of the region to protect “protection of local people.” Users now have to enter a specific location to see the status of traffic on their route, adding an additional feature to some of them.
Two current Google employees also say that, due to changes in conditions during the war and the rise of spam that tends to follow conflicts, Google has not acted on many of the changes proposed by workers and drivers in the West Bank, which they warn. A technical giant to problems such as missing roads or land. This has made the traffic information on the app out of date for the past year. Bourdeau says that Google uses updates when opinions can be verified by reliable sources.
