Even people who avoid online services can find their lives affected by them. For example, one morning you might wake up to find your usually quiet local street has become a busy highway. You can blame satellite navigation services for that.<\/p>\n
Satnav services optimize routes for their users by considering traffic jams, accidents, and roadwork. Such apps get data from municipal services and also from user reporting.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the best known service of this kind is Waze. Acquired by Google in 2013, Waze may serve as a perfect example of how online services can impinge on real life. While making users\u2019 life easier, they can also create safety and privacy problems.
\nFor example, in making the route from A to B faster for its users, Waze has brought intense road traffic to previously quiet streets. The app reroutes cars, trucks, and even tourist buses to quiet streets and alleys to minimize users\u2019 traffic delays.<\/p>\n
In Maryland, one neighborhood is trying to subvert<\/a> Waze by using its own methods. Attempting to make their quiet alleys and streets less appealing to Waze, locals submit fake road accident reports to the service. Waze discards single road accident reports if the data says the real speed on this segment of the road hasn\u2019t decreased, so to overcome that obstacle, resistance groups combine efforts with their neighbors and submit identical fake notifications, thus fooling the app.<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/alexgoldmark\/status\/533368810829791233<\/p>\n Do such tactics work? There are no figures to say one way or the other. Wired<\/i> suggests<\/a> more robust measures to ease neighborhood traffic, such as installing speed bumps, replacing simple intersections with roundabouts, narrowing lanes, and more. These methods work, but you can\u2019t deploy them based solely on a goodwill agreement with neighbors.<\/p>\n It is not just local residents who are enraged. The police are as well \u2014 by a feature alerting drivers to police ambushes. Back in 2014, Los Angeles Chief of Police Charlie Beck went as far as writing a letter<\/a> to Google CEO Larry Page after two police officers were shot in New York by a person who had used Waze to track their location.<\/p>\n Another outraged letter to Page came from the head of the New York Police Union, Edward Mullins, who demanded Google remove the police-tracking feature from the app, threatening<\/a> legal action. Google did not acquiesce: the feature is still there.<\/p>\n The face-off between the police and Waze made other players look closely at the app. Civil rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a> sided with the service, citing the police\u2019s extensive use of face- and license-plate-recognition technologies and other tools that encroach on people\u2019s right to privacy. The EFF pointed out that law enforcement was asking for privacy that it denies citizens.<\/p>\n The dark side of facial recognition? https:\/\/t.co\/7I6B8MAZuW<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/j2O7QkmlF0<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Kaspersky (@kaspersky) August 22, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nOfficial disapproval<\/h3>\n
\n