How Google Maps is making it harder for Palestinians to navigate the West Bank

Buttu, who regularly travels to the West Bank city of Ramallah from his home in Haifa, Israel for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has led him astray several times in recent years. “I was told to drive right into a wall that’s been there since 2003,” he says.

Others encountered the same wall near the Qalandia checkpoint that separates Jerusalem from the West Bank, and almost driving into it became something of a rite of passage. “Once I was trying to get to an office that was in an East Jerusalem neighborhood, and Google Maps absolutely failed me,” says Leila, who works for an American company remotely from Ramallah and asked to use only her first name. for privacy reasons. . “He wanted me to go down a path that was completely cut off by 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, Google Maps users in the West Bank say they were used to receiving potentially unsafe directions. A persistent problem they point out is the fact that Google does not distinguish between unrestricted roads and those that are only allowed to be used by Israelis, such as those that lead from Israeli settlements where Palestinians are not supposed to to go. On the road from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps led Buttu to a locked gate where she says Israeli soldiers approached her car with their guns pointed at her. “I had to explain that I made a mistake,” she says. Google “optimizes to go on the roads of the settlers, which for me as a Palestinian, can be very dangerous.”

Bourdeau says that Google does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes, since it would need to know personal information about users, such as their citizenship.

When Google Maps takes her to settlements, Buttu says she speaks English in hopes of passing as a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly end up in risky areas, they try to turn around or back out as quickly as possible.

In other cases, Google Maps refuses to provide directions at all, such as when navigating between cities in the West Bank, including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the app tells him that it “could not calculate driving directions” (WIRED was able to replicate the same result). One of the current employees of Google says that it is because Google has not invested in enabling directions between the three administrative areas of the West Bank, two of which are officially more controlled by the Israeli authorities. Bourdeau, the Google spokesman, says the company is working to fix the problem.

New challenges

Despite its drawbacks, users tell WIRED that they’ve always found Google Maps to be useful in the region, especially when traveling in unfamiliar places. Since the beginning of the war, however, they feel that the app has become unbearable. Shortly after the fight began, Google shut down the ability to see an overview of live traffic in the region the protection “the security of local communities”. Users now have to enter a specific location to see traffic conditions along their route, potentially adding an additional step for some of them.

Two current Google employees also say that, due to changes in conditions on the ground during the war and an increase in spam that tends to follow conflicts, Google did not act on many suggested changes presented by the employees and drivers of the West Bank, who warn. the tech giant to problems such as roads or missing places. That caused the road data on the app to be outdated over the past year. Bourdeau says Google applies updates when suggestions can be verified through reliable sources.