"In 300m turn left. You have reached your ... please wait. Rerouting."
Sound familiar? Glitches in Google Maps have recently been uncovered in South Africa. The maps have been shown to list streets, suburbs and in some cases buildings which do not exist, are far smaller than represented to be, or are in the wrong place on the map.
Until recently, Google Maps did not show Lesotho's Mohale Dam on its regular map view, although it could be seen on the satellite view.In April 2017, Google Maps listed the presidency as being at the Guptas' Saxonwold compound in Johannesburg.
Cartographers warn that such glitches, uncovered this month by the South African tech website MyBroadband, carry serious potential risks for users.
The first glitch uncovered by MyBroadband was in a suburb of eMalahleni, Mpumalanga.
The website's staff were conducting an internet network speed test on service providers in eMalahleni and were using Google Maps to navigate around Hoëveldpark when they found something strange. On Google Maps the suburb has businesses, lodges and boutiques; in reality it has lots of dirt roads and open veld. The area is not mapped with Google Street View.
MyBroadband editor Kevin Lancaster said the Hoëveldpark anomaly was not the first error they had picked up.
"In January, when we looked for Mohale Dam in Lesotho, Google's satellite map image showed a mass of water. But on Google's 'regular' map, no mass of water was shown. Google has since fixed it."Liezl van der Merwe of Hippo River Lodge in Hoëveldpark said staff often had to come to guests' rescue. "Sometimes they tell us they are in streets we can't even find - and we live here."
Elize van As, a cartographer at the Africa Institute of South Africa, which is part of the Human Sciences Research Council, said the latest discovery was worrying.
"The implications are severe. Several years ago I was working with researchers looking into volcanoes. I was working with maps from Mauritius when I discovered that while a volcano was marked as being on the map, it was not there in reality. The volcano was actually in a completely different area."
Derek Clarke, National Geo-spatial Information chief director, said he had heard reports of mistakes on Google Maps. The NGI is the national mapping organisation.
Clarke confirmed there were areas on Google Maps which do not exist.
"Google Maps obtain their information from multiple private companies, who get their information from other multiple sources." He said it was possible Google had obtained the information for the puzzling area in eMalahleni from the surveyor-general's office, where plans to develop an area had been approved but not acted upon.
In extreme cases, staff had discovered positions on Google Maps that were not accurate.
"Anomalies like this eMalahleni case are concerning, because people make lots of decisions based on what they see on applications like Google Maps."
eMalahleni municipality spokesman Kingdom Mabuza explained one possible reason for the glitch. "The council receives proclamations for areas to be developed, which are approved but not yet constructed. Google then receives this information and captures it on its maps as though the area has already been built.
"We believe there is a possibility that Google in this case is being 'futuristic' about certain suburbs in our own town."
Samantha Perry, of Google in South Africa, said data on Google Maps, which had more than a billion users a month, came from a variety of sources. "Our base-map data, which includes things like place names, borders and road networks, comes from a combination of third-party providers, public sources and user contributions.
"But we recognise there may be occasional inaccuracies."
She said that although Google regularly updated its maps, the amount of time it took to update varied. Google could not specify how many places, villages, suburbs, towns, streets and buildings in South Africa that were on Google Maps did not actually exist, she said...