Virtual Traffic Jam - Google Hack

[sg37409]

Quite funny.

To accomplish this, he loaded 99 smartphones into a wagon and turned them all onto Maps navigation. As he walks down a street, Google recognizes the high concentration of “users” and the slow-moving “traffic” and marks that street as having bad traffic

Also: http://simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html

[nicknack]

 

[Greenbank]

The next stage is to do the same without needing to be physically there:-

Jailbreak an android phone, install a dummy root certificate, sniff the traffic TLS that the phone is sending home to Google maps and then work out how to forge similar from the comfort of your own darkened bedroom.

[arabella]

Do I infer that "traffic jam" in fact means "lots of phones round here"?  & relies on drivers leaving their phones properly on whilst driving.

[Kim]

Do I infer that "traffic jam" in fact means "lots of phones round here"?  & relies on drivers leaving their phones properly on whilst driving.

It's a bit cleverer than that, and I'm not convinced that the proposed method would actually work.  It can presumably tell the difference between a bus stop (lots of phones moving together then stopping) and a traffic jam (lots of phones, moving like cars, that have stopped in a queue)...

Androids tend to default to sharing location data with google most of the time, so if by "properly on" you mean "switched on and with a network connection" then yes.  I drive with my phone in that state all the time.  Sometimes it even rings or makes other notification sounds, which I ignore because I'm driving.  I certainly wouldn't faff about powering it down just because I was about to drive.

[Greenbank]

This particular hack was performed by running the Google Maps app on the phone(s), that way it has legitimate need to both access the location (so it can place the blue splodge on the map) and also get live updates on traffic in the area. By providing location data to google servers they can infer speed and also "busy-ness" of the section of road. Google have done this for a while but they bolstered their capabilities with acquisitions like Waze.

I doubt they're getting frequent enough updates from phones in normal/passive mode with no Google Maps active to be useful for this.

People navigate using apps on their phone all the time. I do when I do unfamiliar journeys but I make sure I disable notifications when doing this so nothing pops up to annoy me.

Separately I've read that Google Maps is using accelerometer data in order to differentiate between a car and a motorbike (probably not just accelerations in a straight forward line but side to side and yaw/pitch/roll) so it's probably able to determine if something is "bus like" and the default identification being "car".

[Zipperhead]

Separately I've read that Google Maps is using accelerometer data in order to differentiate between a car and a motorbike (probably not just accelerations in a straight forward line but side to side and yaw/pitch/roll) so it's probably able to determine if something is "bus like" and the default identification being "car".

I had noticed that when I look at my google timeline it is pretty good a working out whether it was a car or motorbike journey. Another (motorcycle) navigation app that I use provides various stats including maximum bank angle.

[orienteer]

So how do they differentiate bicycles, I wonder?

[Greenbank]

So how do they differentiate bicycles, I wonder?

position (maybe), but probably mostly speed and analysis of the accelerometer data (they really are amazingly sensitive, you could probably make a reasonable cadence sensor even if the phone was just thrown in a pannier).

[FifeingEejit]

I've had it confuse cycling for driving.
And more embarassingly... Walking for cycling.

seems to be based on speed and distance.

[Davef]

He does say he had 90 phones and had to go back and fore up the same street several times before it registered as a jam so it is possibly quite a high threshold. I bet it won’t work again.


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