“My GPS shanghai’d me into a mall, and so I went Shopping.”

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Well, not me, actually, I would never use a GPS (Global Positioning System.)  Not even when I get my license back.  When I rejoined civilization back in October 2009 though, EVERYBODY was using these damn things, and everyone still is.

It seemed to cause them to shut off the part of their mind that keeps track of where they are, which direction their destination is.  It seems to make them block out all visual clues meant to help them with that, and to give over their complete trust and obedience to the all-knowing voice in their car.

They don’t see street signs, they fail to take advantage of street lights and improvised alternate routes (e.g. turning right on reds.)  And how about when they hear “Turn left in two-tenths of a mile,” and there are three closely-spaced streets coming up, and they’re in a panic trying to figure out which one is two-tenths of a mile away, and I’m all, “Don’t you know the name of the street you’re looking for?  There are signs!”

I worry that, just as we never memorize phone numbers any more now that we have cell phones, this is a technology that is going to atrophy another part of our brains, the part that gives us a geographical sense of ourselves.

And then there’s the consideration that – I would think – any healthily paranoid American would be absolutely resistant to using a technology that allows powerful forces – such as the Government, your boss, your spouse – to know exactly where you are at any given moment.

But NOW, the final shoe may have really dropped onto the jumped shark, if you will.  It seems GPS’s are possibly being used to herd us to places we don’t really want to go, for commercial reasons.  I’m going to share my parents’ recent experience with you, and hope to hear back from any of you who have had similar experiences.

My parents’ Sedona trip

So, just recently my parents took a road trip to Sedona, Arizona.  The California leg of the trip was simple enough that they didn’t pull out their Garmin GPS until they got to the Arizona border.

Then, halfway to Sedona, the GPS suddenly ordered my Mom to pull off the highway, cross over, and led her right into the lot of a huge outlet shopping mall.  (No, she didn’t go shopping, that was just my catchy title.)

On the way back from Sedona, with my Dad driving, the GPS tried to get him to go to the same mall, but they knew better.  But then at two other points on the way home, it ordered him to get off on godforsaken highways, in completely the wrong direction.  Since my Mom was insisting the GPS was wrong, my Dad figured it must be right, since he will always do the opposite of what she says.  So he stubbornly followed the GPS to the letter, both times arriving at brand new housing developments with model homes, and adding several hours to their trip back to California.

This got all of us thinking some pretty suspicious thoughts about GPS’s, and how they maybe could be engineered or hijacked  to trick you into buying stuff.

Checking in with a scientist.

I thought as the first step in my research I’d better contact a scientist and see how likely or possible this idea was, so I contacted D—, an old high school friend of mine, who is not only a NASA geophysicist, but also a really smart guy.  And he pretty much shot down our paranoid fantasies:

Howdy Vern,

One of my favorite expressions is “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple incompetence.”   I believe what you describe is an example of the latter.  I concede there *may* be something happening, but not exactly the way you may be thinking.  I have not ever heard of GPS hijacking or any such before, but having no clue has never stopped me from speculating anyway.   (I love the Twain quote that, to paraphrase, says science is so great because you get such a rich payoff in conjecture for such a trifling investment of fact.)

First off, GPS units, as a rule, suck, in the same way that Mapquest sucks.   It’s brute-force, shortest distance between A and B calculation that routinely directs drivers to totally stupid routes.  Once, my wife and I flew from Albuquerque to SoCal for my Mom’s birthday.  We took a Super Shuttle from the Ontario airport to my Mom’s place in Corona.  The driver slavishly followed the GPS despite my repeated admonitions that I knew for certain fact that the way he was going would add half an hour to our travel time. We ended up spending significantly more time in the Super Shuttle van than we had in the air.  Anyway, the rate-limiting step for GPS units is not the satellite info but the software that uses it.

It’s really hard, obviously, to write code that smoothly takes you from any A to any B. And here’s where your notion may be on target:  In the software that interprets the satellite signal, it’d be a simple matter for an unscrupulous vendor to slip in something that puts eyeballs on a friend’s marketable product.  I know nothing about which GPS hardware vendors are reputable or not, but I’d be very surprised if any of them would bother doing something like directing drivers to a new housing development. New housing devs are very ephemeral and will be “ripe” for only a matter of months, and GPS units are expected to be on the market for far longer.  So there would be little business incentive for a GPS maker to insert paid product placement for something like that.

A shopping mall is more feasible; it would be far more likely to exist in the same place for years.  Could the ephemeral thing (housing dev) cut a deal to have their coordinates fed to GPS units in the area?   I cannot imagine such a thing is possible.  Linking with comsats is a long, incredibly bureaucratic process involving many layers of gummint control, and believe you me, all that traffic is closely monitored.  For a housing developer, say, to have the a) scratch, b) patience, and c) connections to pull off a clandestine uplink of GPS info to any orbital asset would be really, really unlikely IMO.

Given how inept GPS (and website) directions are, I’d assign a much higher probability to the algorithm simply making yet another goofy recommendation that just happened to take your folks past something that made them wonder, but that was nothing more than coincidence.  Not the glamorous conclusion, to be sure, but by far the most probable, in my view.

Hope that helps, D—.

Another reason I think this is that to impute a more detailed scenario would assume far more intelligence and initiative on the part of people of whom I believe such a thing to be impossible.  I’m just saying.

So there’s your science-dweeb gut reaction… for what it’s worth,

D—

PS.  Damn it.  Edit, D—, Edit!

So there you have it.  It’s still obviously lame to rely on a GPS for directions, but apparently they are not engineered to trick you into unwanted commercial situations.  And here I thought I might have the beginning of a great investigative series.

Unless… hey, this guy works for NASA.  That’s the government.  Of COURSE that’s what they want us to think!

What do YOU say?