If you’re wondering why a bus full of people with smartphones doesn’t automatically show up as a traffic jam, a bus is very easy to recognize via geolocation, as such a cluster of users follows a predictable path and stops in predictable places. Maybe Weckert’s next experiment should be trying to fool Google Maps into thinking he’s a bus.

A video of the experiment shows how quiet the streets actually were during the “traffic jam”

видео

The question on everyone’s minds is why? Weckert wanted to show how we rely on data to predict reality for us so we can plan our actions around it, trusting it as an objective display of reality, even though the technology used to interpret data can err or be misled, potentially forming an inaccurate model. Commenters are already coming up with ideas for gaming the system based on his experiment, while others think it worked a little too well and could have dangerous consequences.