Last month, Google Maps launched an update to help users easily look up West Bank addresses. Bourdeau says that overall, Google Maps has added about 5,000 miles of roads in the West Bank and Gaza since 2021. Nour Nassar, a director general in the Telecommunication and Digital Economy ministry of the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, tells WIRED she appreciates Google’s efforts.
Longstanding Gripes
Israel’s assault on Gaza has shone a spotlight on what some Palestinians perceive as a digital apartheid. Small groups of workers at several tech companies have protested how common services such as YouTube and Instagram are denied to Palestinians or operate less effectively for them. Google Maps, in particular, has been a source of simmering frustration for years.
In 2018, 7amleh, a Palestinian digital rights organization, published a report on mapping tools that accused Google of allegedly making design choices in its app that disadvantaged Palestinians and helped legitimize the Israeli government’s views of the contested territory.
“Google Maps, as the largest global mapping and route planning service, has the power to influence global public opinion and therefore bears the responsibility to abide by international human rights standards and to offer a service that reflects the Palestinian reality,” the report said.
Because online maps have become a primary way that billions of people understand the world around them, how tech companies like Google depict and label politically sensitive areas and territories regularly generates public backlash and philosophical debate. Some countries, including the US, India, and China, have imposed specific requirements on mapping providers over the years. But the issues in the West Bank center on a specific feature—navigation—that historically hasn’t drawn as much attention but, now as much as ever, poses real safety fears for users.
Buttu, who regularly travels to the city of Ramallah in the West Bank from her home in Haifa, Israel, for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has led her astray many times in recent years. “I’ve been told to drive right into a wall that’s been up since 2003,” she says.
Others have encountered the same wall near the Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the West Bank, and almost driving into it has become something of a rite of passage. “I was once trying to get to an office that was in a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and Google Maps absolutely failed me,” says Leila, who works for a US company remotely from Ramallah and asked to use only her first name for privacy reasons. “It wanted me to go on a road that was completely cut off by 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 accustomed to receiving potentially unsafe directions. One persistent issue they point to is the fact that Google doesn’t distinguish between unrestricted roads and ones that are only permitted to be used by Israelis, such as those leading to and from Israeli settlements where Palestinians aren’t supposed to go. On the route from Haifa to Ramallah, Google Maps once directed Buttu to a closed gate where she says Israeli soldiers approached her car with their guns pointing toward her. “I had to explain I made a mistake,” she says. Google “optimizes for going on settler roads, which for me as a Palestinian, can be very dangerous.”
Read the full article here
