On Sunday, November 24, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a car crossed an unfinished bridge, ending up falling into a river bed, which caused the death of its three occupants. According to local police, says the BBCthis fatal accident is due to a bad indication from Google Maps, which suggested the driver to take this bridge even though the structure in question is currently unusable.
During 2024, part of this bridge collapsed due to heavy flooding. The inhabitants of the area, fully aware of the situation, had obviously stopped using it; alas, the three men who died on Sunday were not part of the local population and were deceived by Google Maps, which they trusted blindly – as many of us would have done.
Google Maps is the most popular navigation application in India: the vast majority of people who need GPS use this app. This also powers the services of many carpooling, e-commerce and meal delivery platforms. According to some reports, it has approximately 60 million active users in the country alone and records almost 50 million searches per day.
Other known victims
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the application has been criticized for providing incorrect instructions. In the past, it has even caused fatal accidents. This is how in 2021, a resident of the state of Maharashtra drowned after taking his car through a dam as Google Maps had indicated to him. In 2023, two young doctors from Kerala also died after driving their car into a river. Police said they followed a route provided by the app and warned users against relying too much on it when the roads were flooded.
When everything is working normally, Google Maps does the following to take the changes into account. GPS signals from user apps track traffic variations along routes: an increase indicates congestion, while a decrease suggests a road is less busy. The app also receives updates from governments and users about traffic jams or closures.
Complaints related to heavy traffic, or those notified by authorities, are prioritized because Google does not have the manpower to handle the millions of complaints that pour in daily. This is what Ashish Nair, founder of the mapping platform Potter Maps and former Google Maps employee, explains: “A map operator then uses satellite imagery, Google Street View and government notifications to confirm the change and update the map.”
According to Ashish Nair, navigation apps cannot be held responsible for accidents as their terms of service clearly state that users should apply their own judgment on the road and the information provided by the app may differ from the actual conditions. He points out that it’s just very difficult for a platform like Google, which manages maps around the world, to keep up with all the changes that happen on a road.
Let us add that unlike other countries, India also does not have a reliable system for reporting these problems on time. “Data remains a major challenge in India. There is no system to record infrastructure changes in a web interface, which could then be used by applications like Google Maps.explains Ashish Nair, who cites Singapore as an example to follow. “Poor quality maps will not disappear until governments are more proactive in collecting and sharing data.”
Source: www.slate.fr
