Did you hear this crazy story from Australia where some people got lost in a national park for a week because Google Maps sent them the wrong way?
They can laugh about it now but it wouldn’t have seemed very funny when they were lost, hungry and tired. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing happened down under.
There is a lesson to be learned here. In our reliance on technology, there’s blind faith that it’s always accurate and up to date.
This clearly isn’t the case. In situations like this where it isn’t, it could be a life or death situation. As it could have been when it sent drivers the wrong way down this 1 way street in Canada.
Technology is a fantastic resource but we need to take it with a grain of salt. We need to consider that it may not be correct.
There are also instances where information not being up to date can have a significant impact on a business. Imagine a restaurant that changes location. According to Google Maps they’re at location x where really they’re at location y.
When people turn up at the wrong location, they won’t know or care about who’s to blame. They will just go somewhere else to eat.
Because it’s not that simple to make changes to Google Maps as this and this story indicate.
Google isn’t the world’s cartographer – it’s an entity who decided to do this for everyone. Because of how much they’ve given us, we take for granted the scope of a project such as this. Mapping out every inch of the world is a massive undertaking and it’s asking a bit much to assume that changes all over the world will instantly be reflected online.
Saying this, there needs to be a more streamlined efficient means to request changes on Google Maps.
While there may not be any easy way for Google to process the tens of thousand requests that it gets every day to update Google Maps, what choice does it have? Now that it’s committed to the undertaking to map the world, it has to be as strong on making sure that map is accurate and up to date.
People clearly rely on this information and it’s critical that it’s correct. In some cases, it’s even a matter of life and death. Otherwise this won’t be the last story along the lines of “Guess What Google Maps did..”
It there are actually fatalities, it’s not going to be as quirky.