Bloody Qalandiya clash underscores danger of relying on Waze
Many drivers like to turn on the navigation app and turn off their minds, but experts say misplaced trust in technology comes at a price
Simona Weinglass is an investigative reporter at The Times of Israel.
After two Israeli soldiers got lost late Monday night, sparking clashes in Qalandiya that led to death of a Palestinian man and scores of injured on both sides, some are questioning why the pair placed so much trust in the Waze navigation app, which led them into the refugee camp.
Qalandiya is in Area C of the West Bank, where Israel retains full security and administrative control, however, Qalandiya camp is under the administrative control of UNRWA. The Israel Defense Forces only occasionally enters the village to conduct arrest raids, because it is considered particularly dangerous to Israelis. The noncombat soldiers who entered the camp late Monday night were directed through there by Waze, and may have overlooked a road sign that warned of the danger. Inside the refugee camp, their army vehicle was pelted with Molotov cocktails and stones, prompting the soldiers to flee and necessitating a rescue operation, in the course of which soldiers and Palestinians exchanged live gunfire.
The Israeli-developed Waze, a crowdsourced map and navigation tool that was acquired by Google for more than $1 billion in 2013, hit back on Tuesday at suggestions its directions had misled the soldiers, arguing that the soldiers were to blame.
“(Waze) includes a specific default setting that prevents routes through areas which are marked as dangerous or prohibited for Israelis to drive through,” the company said in a statement to AFP. “In this case, the setting was disabled. In addition, the driver deviated from the suggested route and as a result, entered the prohibited area.
“There are also red signs on the road in question that prohibit access to Palestinian-controlled territories (for Israelis). It is the responsibility of every driver to adhere to road and traffic signs and obey local laws.”
But Israeli technologist Anderson Mccutcheon told The Times of Israel that the soldiers’ mistake was an instance of a larger societal tendency to put too much faith in technology that does not necessarily merit such trust.
“Technology is often ignorant of the social environment it is being used in,” he says.
Without knowing precisely what happened, Mccutcheon suggests that the app may have crowdsourced both Israeli and Palestinian users’ data and therefore suggested a route that would have been perfectly safe for a Palestinian but not an Israeli soldier.
“This is not something unique to Waze but is an outgrowth of any platform that is used by many people, and for each person the use case can be extremely different,” he says. “For a Palestinian the use case is perfectly safe and a daily function, and for the other person it can be extremely dangerous.”
Mccutcheon says that, ultimately, the user is responsible: “The onus was on the soldiers to not use Waze or to double check. You cannot trust a platform with your safety or legality.”
Nevertheless, sources revealed that IDF soldiers commonly use Waze in nonoperational situations.
Bryan Seely, a Seattle-based cyber-security expert and former US Marine, says that when it comes to military units, “I would hope that they are not relying on civilian technology that can be monitored and potentially tracked. They should be using military GPS or maps, not an iPhone or personal cellular device.”
Seely, whose specialty is bringing bugs and loopholes in Google’s algorithms to public awareness and who famously wiretapped the US Secret Service, says there is a dangerous tendency among law enforcement agents everywhere to use civilian technology “because it’s so convenient, it’s a force of habit.”
A crowdsourcing app, like Waze, says Seely, is not necessarily safe to use, especially for security forces. It may be susceptible to manipulation.
“When Google cannot automate or build an algorithm, their next choice is relying on crowdsourcing. I don’t think that Waze can be manipulated in this way [steering users in the wrong direction], but it would not surprise me either.”
Besides, many users have found Waze’s technology to be less than infallible.
“Waze does mess up,” wrote one Facebook user. “Occasionally it takes you to the wrong place, but what gets me is when it tries to take shortcuts that screw you up, like avoiding the traffic light and then expecting you to turn left across three lanes of rush-hour traffic. And then sometimes it surprises me and comes up with a stellar route… I’ve stopped using it.”
AFP contributed to this report.
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