The family of a US man who drowned after driving off a collapsed bridge are claiming that he died because Google failed to update its maps.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66873982
At first it seems simple. The man was in an unfamiliar place, after dark, in the rain, and he was following the instructions from his Google Maps app to get home. Unfortunately, the map was several years out of date, and the directions told him to drive over a bridge that hadn't been there for nine years. He ended up in the water and drowned.
Local residents had been asking Google for years to update its map (and thus, presumably, its instructions), but it hadn't. So was Google liable for the danger it had put its users to?
It seems likely that it was, until you consider the implications. How many times has TomTom or Garmin tried to send you straight across a major road at a rural crossroads, because its algorithms haven't clocked the fact that you don't actually have the right of way? How many "go straight on"s don't twig that the road bears left? Or say bear left when they mean go straight on, or tell you to take a next left that's a one way system into somebody's car park?
I've had all of those, and survived. Very close to here, there's a T junction at a main road where you're supposed to stop and turn right, but where TomTom tells me to go straight ahead. Which would land me in the River Avon if I didn't apply a bit of common sense. And haven't there been cases where the satnav forgot to tell its users to check that the swing bridge was closed before they tried to drive onto it?
All very terrible. I daresay Google and the rest have liability waivers and exclusion clauses in their small print. But isn' it ultimately the driver's responsibility to be paying attention, and doesn't the buck stop with his personal judgement? That's what I'd always believed, anyway.
Thoughts?
BJ