Do you remember when there were no solutions like Google Maps? We wandered in search of the destination a bit at random, perhaps asking some passersby for information, hoping not to get lost in an unknown city. Since Maps entered into daily common use, it has changed the way we orient ourselves in an unknown area, it helps us find and find places, clubs, shops that we would not otherwise have noticed and allows us to plan more efficiently the our itineraries.
For some time Google Maps has also included real-time information on the state of traffic, showing those congested roads in red and thus allowing us to evaluate an alternative route. But be careful, this information can be "easily" sweetened.
Like? This was demonstrated by a German artist passionate about technology, Simon Weckert, who has recovered 99 second-hand phones and placed them in a trolley, carrying them between roads and lanes. Google Maps servers have interpreted this as one traffic congestion which was therefore shown on the map to all users of the service. And this, on the other hand, may have prompted drivers to move to another route to avoid a road that is actually traffic-free.
The purpose of this experiment on the one hand may have shown a weak point in the Google Maps data management system, but on the other it also demonstrates how the decisions we make in the newspaper are now heavily conditioned by technology, as if we had decided to relieve the our brain from the tiring task of making decisions. When maybe it would be enough to use a pinch of common sense.
