Title basically. But wondering how they can tell that a particular business is “busy” or not.
In: Technology
Google being Google, they probably take an aggregate of the cell phone GPS data gleaned from people’s phones visiting when gathered in one place during normal business hours.
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No no they track you through the chip embedded with the covid vaccine. My cell phone, my rights. /s
Unless you’ve turned it off, Google actively tracks users’ whereabouts and can therefore calculate the amount of people in a certain area based on this. If you use Google stuff a lot you can probably check places you’ve been on Google maps and it will tell you “Last visited ____ ago”.
There is a video of a guy putting a bunch of cell phones in a couple boxes and putting them on an empty street. Google maps showed that there was heavy traffic as a result.
Google tracks cellphones constantly and has developed a baseline for how many cellphones in a geographical location regularly broadcast GPS data. When there are more devices broadcasting GPS data than usual, the logical assumption is there are more people there. Thus is unusually busy.
Of course, while that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption, that isn’t *necessarily* true because Google tracks cellphones, not actual people. Several individuals have made videos showing how this works by driving around in a car with a trunk full of functioning cellphones. Google, of course, think each cellphone corresponds to a different individual.
I’ve even heard about one particularly comedic instance where a guy riding a bicycle while playing Pokemon Go with a couple dozen cell phones simultaneously inadvertently caused Google Maps to erroneously report a gridlock because Google Maps thought that each phone was a separate car.
They have real-time location data from millions of phones.
Google has enough data to know a lot about every business’s …busy-ness.
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