When exploring new territories in your car, the Waze app makes life easier by providing GPS directions, reroutes to help drivers avoid roads with traffic and even crowdsourcing updates on the road from potholes to cops. The smartphone navigation app used by over 50 million drivers is now toying with the concept of helping drivers avoid high-crime areas.
This controversial safety feature is slated to debut in Brazil and use crime data verified by a third party. The app could potential crowdsource crime data from its users as well. The caveat, however, is the accuracy of crime data.
"Crime data is notoriously unreliable," said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ezekiel Edwards to CBS News. "People would be relying on flawed data to make decisions about where to drive and where not to drive, with whom to engage and with whom not to engage, perhaps where to spend money, where not to spend money ... and further perpetuate inequalities among neighborhoods as a result.”
The update will reportedly roll out before the Summer Olympics in Brazil and may never see the light of day in the US.
“We're working with the [Brazilian] government, we're working with local community groups who are able to identify which neighborhoods have safety issues,” said Waze’s head of brand, Julie Mossler, to CBS News.
Waze also announced a new default feature allowing drivers to avoid what the app calls “difficult intersections” -- this will encompass alerting drivers when they’re approaching a street with no lights or a busy intersection with no stop signs. Previously, Waze directions would often instruct drivers to make risky left turns or drive across multiple lanes through traffic.
“By default, Waze will calculate the best possible route that bypasses a difficult intersection,” wrote Waze in a blog post. “That being said, when the bypassing route is significantly longer, a driver may still be routed through a difficult intersection. The goal of the feature is to reduce the amount of these intersections, not completely eliminate them.”
While this adds a few minutes to the journey, it ensures drivers are safer. Enabling this feature will be an option and users have the power to disable it.
"If you are commuting 40 minutes to an hour, maybe it adds a couple minutes here and there," Waze's Amber Kirby told CBS News. "They can then either opt to turn it off, or they can make the turn anyway. ... Waze will reroute you.”
Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013, launched the “difficult intersections” feature in Los Angeles. It is slated to debut in New Orleans, Boston and Washington DC later this year.
