Incident 155: Google Maps Allegedly Directed Sierra Nevada Travelers to Dangerous Roads amid Winter Storm
Description: Lake Tahoe travelers were allegedly guided by Google Maps into hazardous shortcuts in the mountains during a snowstorm.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Google Maps developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Google Maps users traveling in Sierra Nevada and Google Maps users traveling in the mountains.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
155
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2021-12-27
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
It appears that Google Maps may have guided weary Lake Tahoe travelers to closed-off and even dangerous roads amid record-setting snowfall.
Social media posts, including from Crystal Kolden, a professor of forest sciences at UC Merced, have…
The road once carried stagecoaches during the Gold Rush, twisting its way through what is now a national forest and an area of the Sierra Nevada known for snowmobiling.
In the winter, the rugged passage, known as the Quincy-La Porte Road or…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
