4 ms·

Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other and report it to Maps, which would then presumably figure out that they're too close to represent s

Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other and report it to Maps, which would then presumably figure out that they're too close to represent separate vehicles?

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Just a guess: there's little economic incentive to perform this attack, and it would also be pretty expensive to perform regularly. So detecting and preventing it has not been a priority up to now. If people started doing it regularly, I'm sure countermeasures would be put in place.
- vongomben 7y ago
  Why expensive? If you compare it with other forms of rioting and strike I think is still cheap. Ghost digital crowd. BTW I wonder if you really need 99 different data Sims cards or rather have a smartphone hotspotting every 5.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Expensive in time compared to benefit accrued/harm done. At a minimum you have to spend a person's time on it, both in the gathering of a bunch of used phones, the setting up of many phone lines, and the actual work of walking on the street. A small street seeming busy on Google Maps doesn't really matter that much. Especially, if the street is not actually busy, since that's kind of an indicator that people don't really want to use it anyway. So the amount of traffic you'd potentially divert is similarly small. This seems really obvious to me, so if it doesn't seem that way to you, maybe we just have different priors. I can't explain it any better than this, though.
    - wtracy 7y ago
      It doesn't strike me as particularly expensive compared to getting thirty-plus bicyclists to go down the street in a block like the Critical Mass activists do.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        Critical mass tends to target busy city streets, partly perhaps with the goal of causing actual congestion. I daresay it wouldn't serve as much of a protest if the entire goal were making Google maps look worse.
missosoup 7y ago
> Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other Because GPS in built-up areas has super low precision and position estimates jump by tens of meters. A cart of phones is going to be almost indistinguishable from a pack of cars. "But missosoup don't phones also have accelerometers and gyros?" Sure, but they're used to feed into a Kalman filter that produces the position estimate. Apps don't generally access high resolution sensor feeds because the positioning service is already doing the best job possible. Even with that, it's hard to distinguish multiple cars accelerating from a green light compared to a bag of mobile phones being carted around. tl;dr: it's hard. Measures can be taken to filter out these attacks but they'll come at the expense of reducing the accuracy of regular traffic data. Unless these attacks start becoming a real problem, it's probably not worth it.

Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other and report it to Maps, which would then presumably figure out that they're too close to represent separate vehicles?

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

Just a guess: there's little economic incentive to perform this attack, and it would also be pretty expensive to perform regularly. So detecting and preventing it has not been a priority up to now. If people started doing it regularly, I'm sure countermeasures would be put in place.

vongomben 7y ago
Why expensive? If you compare it with other forms of rioting and strike I think is still cheap. Ghost digital crowd. BTW I wonder if you really need 99 different data Sims cards or rather have a smartphone hotspotting every 5.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Expensive in time compared to benefit accrued/harm done. At a minimum you have to spend a person's time on it, both in the gathering of a bunch of used phones, the setting up of many phone lines, and the actual work of walking on the street. A small street seeming busy on Google Maps doesn't really matter that much. Especially, if the street is not actually busy, since that's kind of an indicator that people don't really want to use it anyway. So the amount of traffic you'd potentially divert is similarly small. This seems really obvious to me, so if it doesn't seem that way to you, maybe we just have different priors. I can't explain it any better than this, though.
  - wtracy 7y ago
    It doesn't strike me as particularly expensive compared to getting thirty-plus bicyclists to go down the street in a block like the Critical Mass activists do.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      Critical mass tends to target busy city streets, partly perhaps with the goal of causing actual congestion. I daresay it wouldn't serve as much of a protest if the entire goal were making Google maps look worse.

missosoup 7y ago

> Why can't the phones determine their proximity to each other Because GPS in built-up areas has super low precision and position estimates jump by tens of meters. A cart of phones is going to be almost indistinguishable from a pack of cars. "But missosoup don't phones also have accelerometers and gyros?" Sure, but they're used to feed into a Kalman filter that produces the position estimate. Apps don't generally access high resolution sensor feeds because the positioning service is already doing the best job possible. Even with that, it's hard to distinguish multiple cars accelerating from a green light compared to a bag of mobile phones being carted around. tl;dr: it's hard. Measures can be taken to filter out these attacks but they'll come at the expense of reducing the accuracy of regular traffic data. Unless these attacks start becoming a real problem, it's probably not worth it.