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Butu, who regularly travels to Ramallah from his home in Haifa, Israel, for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has misled him many times in recent years he says.
Others have encountered the same wall at the Qalandiya crossing that separates Jerusalem from the West Bank, and driving there has almost become a rite of passage failed,” said Leila, who works for an American company based out of Ramallah and asked that only her name be used for privacy. “It wanted me to go down a path that was completely cut off from the wall.”
Google’s Bourdeau tells WIRED that the company is investigating the route and will update if it can verify the situation against reliable data.
Even before the war, West Coast Google Maps users say they were used to getting potentially unsafe directions. One persistent problem they point to is the fact that Google doesn’t distinguish between unobstructed roads and those that which are only allowed to be used by Israelis, such as carrying and Israeli settlements where Palestinians are not supposed to go, from Haifa to Ramallah On the route, Google Maps once directed Butu to a closed gate, where he says Israeli soldiers approached his car with guns pointed at him. “I had to explain that I was wrong,” he says. optimizes for going on settler roads, which for me as a Palestinian can be very dangerous.”
Burdeau says Google doesn’t distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes because it would need to know personal information about users, such as their citizenship.
When Google Maps leads him to settlements, Butu says he speaks English, hoping to pass as a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly find themselves in risky areas, they try to to turn or back up quickly.
In other cases, Google Maps refuses to provide directions at all, such as navigating between West Bank cities including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the app tells them it “cannot calculate driving directions” (WIRED was able to replicate the same). result) one current Googler says this is because Google hasn’t invested in allowing destinations between the three administrative territories on the West Coast. the two are officially more controlled by the Israeli authorities.Google’s Burdo says the company is working on a solution.
New challenges
Despite its shortcomings, users tell WIRED that in the past Google Maps has been useful in the region, especially when traveling to unfamiliar places Google disabled the ability to see live traffic overview in the region protect “Security 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 said that because of the changing conditions on the ground during the war and the increase in spam following the conflict, Google did not act on many of the proposed changes brought forward by employees and drivers on the West Coast, which raised the alarm; The tech giant has faced issues such as missing streets or locations, which has led to the app’s road data becoming out of date over the past year.
