Robert Bennett of Pickatrail.com thinks so. In a post titled “Smartphone Trail Apps and Cartographic Spam on the Web” he lays out the case.
By cartographic spam, he means smartphone-collected tracks that show up online on sites like EveryTrail.com, that have significant errors in them. It’s a well thought out piece that breaks down the type of errors you see and goes into the reasons why smartphones are poorly suited to track collection. Consider this section on static navigation filters:
Many smartphones use GPS chips with static navigation filters enabled by default because the devices are used in vehicle navigation. Static navigation filters block spurious readings when the smartphone is moving slowly, for example as a car rolls slowly towards a stop sign. If a hiker records data from a trail using a smartphone while velocity is less than 50 feet per minute, GPS chips with static navigation filters can increase the probability that erroneous data is recorded.
He goes on to blame not only these apps for the problem, but search engines for indexing such poor quality content, pointing out that…
Hazards in the outdoors are always present, but this is especially true when visibility is reduced or the ground is featureless, for example when there is snow on the ground. If a person downloads inaccurate and erroneous points and follows them on a GPS device to a hazard while visibility is reduced or the ground is featureless then death or injury is possible.
His post raises many good questions:
- What responsibility do users, app makers, web publishers and search engines have in ensuring accuracy?
- Is it possible for search engines to filter out poor quality GPS tracks?
- How significant are the liability issues?
- Is it reasonable to expect a user to match up exact trail names when they may be hiking a loop that comprises segments of several trails?
I frequently use such sites to download tracks of trails, and I have seen plenty of errors. The worst are often easy to spot if you’re somewhat familiar with a trail, but I’ve often been out on the trail before I realized the errors.
What do you think about this issue and how can improvements be made?