Buttu, who regularly travels from her home in Haifa, Israel, to the West Bank city of Ramallah for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has often led her astray in recent years. “I've been told to drive into a wall that's been up since 2003,” she says.
Others have encountered the same wall at the Qalandia checkpoint that separates Jerusalem from the West Bank, and almost crashing into it has become something of a rite of passage. “I once tried to reach an office in a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, but Google Maps absolutely failed,” says Leila, who works for an American company away from Ramallah and has asked that only her first name be used for privacy reasons. . “It wanted me to go on a road that was completely cut off by the wall.”
Google's Bourdeau tells WIRED that the company is investigating the route and will make an update if it can verify the situation with reliable data.
Even before the war, Google Maps users in the West Bank say they were used to receiving potentially unsafe directions. A persistent problem they point to is the fact that Google does not distinguish between unrestricted roads and roads that can only be used by Israelis, such as roads leading to and from Israeli settlements where Palestinians are not allowed to go. On the route from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps once sent Buttu to a locked gate, where she said Israeli soldiers approached her car with their guns pointed at her. “I had to explain that I had made a mistake,” she says. Google “optimizes for entering settler roads, which can be very dangerous for me as a Palestinian.”
Bourdeau says Google does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes because that requires personal information about users, such as their citizenship.
When Google Maps directs her to settlements, Buttu says she speaks English hoping to pass as a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly find themselves in high-risk areas, they try to turn around or return as quickly as possible.
In other cases, Google Maps refuses to provide directions at all, such as when navigating between West Bank cities including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the app tells them that “directions could not be calculated” (WIRED was able to replicate the same result). One of current Google employees says this is because Google has not invested in enabling directions between the three administrative areas of the West Bank, two of which are officially more under the control of Israeli authorities. Bourdeau, the Google spokesperson, said the company is working to address the problem.
New challenges
Despite the drawbacks, users tell WIRED that they previously still found Google Maps useful in the region, especially when traveling to unfamiliar places. But since the start of the war, they find the app unbearable. Shortly after the fighting started, Google shut down the ability to see an overview of live traffic in the region to 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 say that due to changing conditions on the ground during the war and an increase in spam that often follows conflict, Google has not acted on many of the proposed changes submitted by employees and drivers on the West Bank. the technology giant for problems such as missing streets or places. As a result, the road data on the app has become outdated over the past year. Bourdeau says Google applies updates when suggestions can be verified through reliable sources.
