In an attempt to protect citizens, Google has temporarily disabled live traffic features offered by Maps in Ukraine. The ongoing invasion by Russia has led the company to shut down the service for now, as the traffic information could potentially endanger members of the public.
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The features use anonymous location data collected from Android smartphones to show where there are traffic delays on roads and which businesses and stores are busy. Experts say such data could offer insight into the progress of the invasion. One open source intelligence (OSINT) expert said he saw signs of the Russian invasion early last Thursday after spotting unusual “traffic jams” at the Ukrainian border on Google Maps.
“I think we were the first people to see the invasion,” OSINT expert, Professor Jerry Lewis of the Middlebury Institute, said last week. “And we saw it in a traffic app.”
According to Google, the decision to disable these features was made in order to local users’ safety. This decision was made after consultation with the Ukrainian authorities. Global users will no longer able be to see the data, however, users within the country will still be able to use turn-by-turn navigation on the platform.
Location data collected by mapping services often offers these sorts of unexpected insights. For example, when fitness tracking app Strava released a map in 2017 of users’ activity, it accidentally revealed the location of several US military bases, showing where soldiers had been running laps around airfields. Similarly, Snapchat’s geolocation features have been used to collect images and videos from the frontline in the Iraq War. And with or without location data, information shared in warzones via social media has become a vital tool for open-source investigators, journalists, and others.
“I think big data companies often don’t want to face squarely how useful their data can be,” OSINT investigator Lewis said. “I mean, it’s cool when we do it, right? It’s maybe less cool if the Russians were able to do something similar to, you know, spotting an offensive from Ukrainians.”
