How Google Maps Makes It Harder for Palestinians to Navigate the West Bank

Battu, who regularly commutes from his home in Haifa, Israel, to the West Bank city of Ramallah for work and to visit friends, said Google Maps has led him astray many times in recent years. “I’ve been told to drive between walls that have been up since 2003,” he says

Others have encountered the same wall near the Qalandiya checkpoint that separates Jerusalem from the West Bank, and driving over it has become almost a ritual. “I was once trying to get to an office in a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and Google Maps failed me completely,” said Leila, who works for a US company far from Ramallah and asked to use only her first name for privacy reasons. . “It wanted me to go down a road 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 getting potentially unsafe directions. A persistent problem they point to is that Google doesn’t distinguish between free roads and those that are only allowed to be used by Israelis, such as those leading to Israeli settlements, and those that Palestinians are not supposed to go through. On his way from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps once pointed Battu to a closed gate where he said Israeli soldiers near his car pointed their guns at him. “I had to explain that I was wrong,” she says. Google optimizes for “getting on settler roads, which could be very dangerous for me as a Palestinian.”

Bordo said that Google does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes, because it requires knowing personal information about users, such as their citizenship.

When Google Maps led him to the settlement, Battu says he spoke English hoping to pass as a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they end up in an unexpectedly dangerous area, they try to turn around or go back as quickly as possible.

In other instances, Google Maps refuses to provide directions entirely, such as when navigating between West Bank cities including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the app tells them it “could not calculate driving directions.” (WIRED was able to replicate the same results.) One of the current Google employees said that Google has not invested in enabling directions between the three administrative areas of the West Bank, two of which are officially controlled by Israeli authorities. Google spokesperson Bordeau said the company is working to fix the problem.

new challenge

Despite its flaws, users told WIRED that they still found Google Maps helpful in the area, especially when they traveled to unfamiliar places. Since the start of the war, however, they feel the app has become unsustainable. Soon after the war started, Google disabled the ability to see an overview of live traffic in the region to protect “Local Community Safety.” Users now have to input a specific location to see traffic conditions on their route, adding a potential extra step for some of them.

Two current Google employees also said that, due to the changing conditions on the ground during the war and the increase in spam that followed the conflict, Google did not act on many of the suggested edits submitted by employees and drivers in the West Bank, warning that the tech giant would Issues like missing. This is because the road data in the app has become outdated over the past year. Bourdeau says Google applies updates when suggestions can be verified by reliable sources.