How Google Maps Makes It Harder for Palestinians to Navigate the West Bank

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.”

Bourdeau says Google does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli routes, as that would require knowing personal information about users, such as their citizenship.

When Google Maps leads her into settlements, Buttu says she speaks in English in the hopes of passing as a lost foreigner. Other Palestinian users tell WIRED that when they unexpectedly end up in risky areas, they try to turn around or backtrack as quickly as possible.

In other instances, Google Maps refuses to provide directions altogether, like when navigating between cities in the West Bank, including Hebron and Ramallah. Instead, the app tells them it “could not calculate driving directions.” (WIRED was able to replicate the same result.) One of the current Google employees says that’s because Google hasn’t invested in enabling directions between the West Bank’s three administrative areas, two of which are officially more controlled by Israeli authorities. Bourdeau, the Google spokesperson, says the company is working to address the issue.

New Challenges

Despite its drawbacks, users tell WIRED they still previously found Google Maps to be helpful in the region, especially when they traveled to unfamiliar places. Since the war began, though, they feel the app has become unbearable. Soon after the fighting started, Google shut off the ability to see an overview of live traffic in the region to protect “the safety of local communities.” Users now have to input a specific location to see traffic conditions along their route, adding a potentially additional step for some of them.

Two current Google employees also say that, due to shifting conditions on the ground during the war and an uptick in spam that tends to follow conflicts, Google hasn’t acted on many of the suggested edits submitted by employees and West Bank drivers, which alert the tech giant to problems like missing streets or places. That has caused road data on the app to become outdated over the past year. Bourdeau says Google applies updates when suggestions can be verified through reliable sources.