How Google Maps is making it harder for Palestinians to navigate the West Bank

Butu, who regularly travels to the West Bank city of Ramallah from her home in Haifa, Israel for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has misled her many times in recent years. “They told me to hit a wall that’s been up since 2003,” she says.

Others have encountered the same wall near the Qalandiya checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the West Bank, and almost driving into it has become something of a rite of passage. “Once I was trying to get to an office that was in an East Jerusalem neighborhood and Google Maps absolutely failed me,” said Leila, who works for an American company far from Ramallah and asked to use only her first name for privacy reasons. “He wanted me to go down a path that was completely cut off from 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 against reliable data.

Even before the war, Google Maps users in the West Bank say they were used to receiving potentially dangerous directions. One persistent problem they point to is the fact that Google doesn’t distinguish between unrestricted roads and those that are only allowed to be used by Israelis, such as those leading to and from Israeli settlements where Palestinians are not supposed to walk. On the route from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps once directed Butu to a closed gate, where she says Israeli soldiers approached her car with guns pointed at her. “I had to explain that I made a mistake,” she says. Google “optimizes for traffic on settler roads, which for me as a Palestinian can be very dangerous.”

Burdeau says Google doesn’t distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes because that would require knowing personal information about users, such as their citizenship.

When Google Maps takes her to settlements, Buttu says she speaks English in hopes of passing as a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly find themselves in risky areas, they try to turn around or go back as quickly as possible.

In other cases, 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 “couldn’t calculate driving directions” (WIRED was able to reproduce the same result). One current Google employee says this is because Google has not invested in providing directions 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 address the issue.

New challenges

Despite its shortcomings, users tell WIRED that they still found Google Maps useful in the region, especially when traveling to unfamiliar locations. Since the beginning of the war, however, they felt that the application had become intolerable. Soon after the fighting began, Google turned off the ability to see an overview of live traffic in the region for protection “the safety of local communities”. Users now have to enter a specific location to see traffic conditions along their route, potentially adding an extra step for some.

Two current Google employees also say that because of the changing conditions on the ground during the war and the increase in spam that typically follows conflict, Google did not act on many of the suggested edits submitted by West Bank employees and drivers who alert the tech giant to issues like missing streets or locations. This has caused the traffic data in the app to become outdated over the past year. Burdeau says Google applies updates when suggestions can be verified by reliable sources.