Buttu, who regularly travels to Ramallah in the West Bank from her home in Haifa, Israel, for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has repeatedly led her astray in recent years. “They told me to drive straight into a wall that has been standing since 2003,” he says.
Others have encountered the same wall near the Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the West Bank, and entering it has almost become something of a rite of passage. “I once tried to get to an office near East Jerusalem, but Google Maps completely failed me,” says Leila, who works for an American company far from Ramallah and asked to apply only her first name for privacy reasons. “They wanted me to take 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 said they were accustomed to receiving potentially unsafe directions. A persistent problem they point out is that Google does not distinguish between unrestricted roads and roads that can only be used by Israelis, such as those leading to and from Israeli settlements where Palestinians are not supposed to go. On one occasion, en route from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps directed Buttu to a locked gate, where she says Israeli soldiers approached her car with guns pointed at her. “I had to explain that I had made a mistake,” she says. Google “optimizes for navigating settlement roads, which can be very dangerous for me as a Palestinian.”
Bourdeau says Google does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes because that would require knowing users’ personal information, such as their citizenship.
When Google Maps leads her to the housing estates, Buttu claims to speak English, hoping to pass her off as a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly find themselves in risky areas, they try to turn back or retreat as quickly as possible.
In other cases, Google Maps does not provide directions at all, such as when navigating between West Bank cities, including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the app tells them it “could not calculate directions” (WIRED was able to replicate the same result). One current Google employee says this is because Google has not invested in enabling routing between the three administrative areas of the West Bank, two of which are officially more controlled by Israeli authorities. Bourdeau, the Google spokesman, says the company is working to resolve the issue.
Recent challenges
Despite the flaws, users tell WIRED they still found Google Maps useful in the region, especially when traveling to unfamiliar places. However, since the beginning of the war, they believe that the application has become unbearable. Shortly after the fighting began, Google disabled the ability to view live traffic in the region protect “security of local communities”. Users now have to enter a specific location to see traffic conditions on their route, potentially an extra step for some.
Two current Google employees also claim that due to changing conditions on the ground during the war and an raise in spam tending to trigger military conflicts, Google has failed to respond to many of the suggested changes sent by West Bank workers and drivers that have alerted the tech giant to problems such as missing streets and places. This has caused the app’s road data to become dated over the past year. Bourdeau says Google applies updates when suggestions can be verified with credible sources.