German artist Simon Weckert recently went viral after posting a video on YouTube dragging a small cart with 99 smartphones on an empty street and tricking Google Maps into showing a traffic jam.
Basically, Weckert loaded 99 smartphones with Google Maps turned on onto a small wagon cart and then pulled that cart around various streets in Berlin, including outside the Google office building. He was thus reportedly able to fool Google’s GPS app into thinking that there was a high concentration of users on those streets. And because the phones were being carried in a slow-moving cart, the app was also tricked into thinking that it was detecting a traffic jam.
