The Australian police have been rescuing people who become stranded after blindly following Apple devices into unfamiliar wilderness and getting lost or stuck. A public warning has been issued to try and help avoid catastrophe:
“If it was a 45-degree day, someone could actually die,” Mildura’s Local Area Commander Inspector Simon Clemence told state broadcaster ABC.
“It’s quite a dangerous situation, so we would be calling for people not to use the new Apple iPhone mapping system if they’re travelling from South Australia to Mildura.”
Police said at least five vehicles had become stranded in the park after drivers followed directions on their Apple iPhones, some of them after being stranded for up to 24 hours without food or water.
It seems a bit extreme to tell people not to use the system at all. I’d have said use it with extreme caution or use it as a secondary device to local knowledge or recently verified information.
What the Australian incident news I have read fails to mention is that this is a long-standing problem. Not only are map devices prone to error but local authorities have previously warned about people relying on them too much.
I have spoken about this many times when presenting on the security risks of Big Data. Integrity issues of the data that people rely upon are a major problem. Here’s the most recent version of a slide from my deck:
The tiny white URL at the bottom of the slide takes you to the story.
Three young women escaped the sinking Mercedes-Benz SUV after the vehicle’s GPS directed them down a boat launch and into the Mercer Slough in Bellevue, Washington.
The driver thought she was on a road while following her GPS unit just after midnight, but she was actually heading down the boat launch.
Just last year after a conference in Las Vegas I started driving through the vast desert to the south of Death Valley. I noticed warnings both from Garmin and from law enforcement about over-reliance on any electronic map. The most common problem, they explained at that time, was taking a turn onto a road that no longer (or never) existed and becoming stuck in the sand.
It was true. As I drove down roads narrowed by soft and dangerous shoulders I could see on my map several turns where there was nothing but drifting sand.
The real story is thus that Apple is not doing enough to warn users of the risks of trusting their maps, leaving it up to small and local community budgets to carry the weight of education as well as rescue of outsiders arriving with flawed technology.
And it’s not just Apple.
This point was driven home to me (pun not intended) when I watched a Google speaker last week present on the future of big data applications. The presentation painted an almost nauseatingly rosy picture of transportation entirely dependent on their service. It was one of those moments when I knew the security industry was not being integrated enough and there would be a lot of work ahead.
Is there a song called “Let’s go everywhere man, only if we can get out again?”