Last updated on March 29th, 2022 at 10:15 pm
You worked hard for years, then actually wound up living the American Dream: your own house in a nice quiet part of town, with a lawn and even a backyard, too. And a garage. A two-car garage, no less. It might even be attached. Plus quiet neighbors, leafy tree- and bush-lined sidewalks, wide open streets…the American Dream come true.
Except it’s 2016 and apps like Waze and Google Maps are so popular they’re really a must, one of the top reasons to own a smartphone. And so those wide open streets are anything but quiet anymore. Not even so open, given all the cars passing through these days. Every day. Several hundred an hour now from just ten or so before.
It’s the flip-side of technological progress: major disruption — in this case, of many a neighborhood’s peace and quiet as motorists consult such apps advising them on the quickest routes.
Who’d ever have thought that an app intended to avoid traffic can become a generator of traffic??
Because Car Traffic Engine Computer App Wars!
And so fed-up homeowners have taken it upon themselves to stop crisscrossing car-drivers. They’ve opened accounts at Waze and the like and have posted false reports of roadblocks in their neighborhoods, construction on their streets, traffic accidents outside their homes…but of course the brains behind these hi-tech apps have various safeguards in place to catch and neutralize such sabotage. For example, since these apps access the GPS functionality of their users’ smartphones, they know where everyone is and how fast they’re going — so if a few stationary accounts report some kind of roadblock and yet everyone else is zipping through that roadblock just fine, then obviously some folks need to be banned from the service!
“There’s an App for That”…Not
Supposedly, there’s an app for everything — anything you want to do, somebody’s built the software already. But that’s highly doubtful in this matter.
The truth is that there’s just nothing disgruntled homeowners and neighbors can hope for — except maybe an app that allows them to turn the tables somehow, sending out false GPS info to Waze and Google Maps so that they are not stationary but “appropriately mobile” (that is, moving at a realistic speed)…who knows. But there’s also the very real and practical legal matter that, well, it’s perfectly legal for people to drive through quiet neighborhoods, even en masse…and speaking of legality, whatever hack that’s built could be argued to constitute an actual real-life no-joke harm to Waze or Google Maps of what have you: in so far as the hack is successful, it prevents these services from being useful — and the only way for the hack to be useful is to, as its very name implies, somehow hack into these services, surely violating their TOC’s…unless the law changes — and folks have raised the issue with their local representatives, though efforts have been extremely rare and unfruitful so far.
