How One Artist Hacked Google Maps to Fake a Traffic Jam and Make a Point About the Flaws of Big Data

Armed with nothing but a little red wagon filled with 99 secondhand cellphones, artist Simon Weckert managed to cause a sprawling traffic jam—a very 21st-century virtual traffic jam, that is.

The Berlin-based artist simply turned on all the phones with the Google Maps app launched, and strolled down quiet city streets with his handcart. The blocks he walked down weren’t congested, but what Google Maps saw was a signal cluster. Typically that would indicate a traffic jam or some other mishap, which prompts the app to transmit that information so that users can avoid the area and seek alternative routes.

Weckert’s intervention was born from a simple question. Google Maps functions by aggregating data from multiple sources, but mainly relies on actual users who have location services turned on—so what would happen if you created a literal scrum of digital devices? The idea first came to Weckert when he was attending a May Day demonstration in Berlin, when, among the throngs of people, he realized that Google Maps was visualizing the concentration of people (and their phones) as vehicles on the street.

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