Waze
Waze Mobile Ltd,[2] (/weɪz/; Hebrew: ווייז מובייל בע"מ) doing business as Waze (Hebrew: ווייז), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to turn-by-turn navigation, it incorporates user-submitted travel times and route details while downloading location-dependent information over a cellular network. Waze describes its application as a community-driven initiative that is free to download and use.
This article is about the GPS navigation software. For the Skepta, Chip and Young Adz song, see Waze (song). For the Tierra Whack song, see Whack World.Developer(s)
2006 (as FreeMap Israel)
50 languages[1]
The software was originally developed in Israel by Waze Mobile, a company founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Ehud Shabtai, Amir Shinar, and Uri Levine, veterans of the Israeli intelligence unit 8200.[3][4] Funding for the initial project was provided by two Israeli venture capital firms, Magma and Vertex Ventures Israel, as well as by an early-stage American venture capital firm, Bluerun Ventures. In June 2013, Waze Mobile was acquired by Google for US$1.3 billion.[5][6][7]
The application generates revenue through hyperlocal advertising to an estimated 130 million users.[8]
History[edit]
Development[edit]
In 2006, Israeli programmer Ehud Shabtai founded a community project known as FreeMap Israel, which aimed to create (with the crowd-sourcing assistance of community users) a free digital mapping database of Israel compiled in the Hebrew language with ensured free content, updates, and distribution.[9] In 2008, Shabtai formed a company called Waze to commercialize the initial project;[10] in 2009, it was renamed to Waze Mobile Ltd.
In 2010, the company raised US$25 million in the second round of funding;[11] an additional $30 million was raised in financing in the following year.[12] The application was updated in 2011 to display real-time, community-curated points of interest, including local events such as street fairs and protests.[13]
By December 2011, Waze had employed 80 people, 70 of whom were based in Raʽanana, Israel, with the remaining 10 based in Palo Alto, United States.[14][15] In November 2012, the company began to monetize its application, offering resellers and advertisers a web interface to advertise based on location, where a small icon appears when a phone is at a particular location, prompting the user to engage.[16] It also offers television news stations a web interface to broadcast current traffic reports and alerts directly from the Waze application; the service had been in use by 25 American television news stations by June 2013.[17] It has also been used in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, inside Rio's Operations Center since July 24, 2013,[18] as well as in the American states of New York and New Jersey since 2012.
In 2013, the GSM Association, a trade association of mobile network operators, gave Waze the Best Overall Mobile App award at the association's Mobile World Congress exhibition.[19]
Acquisition by Google[edit]
In June 2013, Waze was acquired by Google for $1.3 billion.[5][6][7] Waze's then-100 employees received about $1.2 million on average: the largest payout to employees in Israeli high tech.[20]
In June 2013, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States began a consideration of whether Google's acquisition of Waze was potentially violating competition law;[21] Waze was among a very small group of competitors in the mobile mapping sector against Google Maps. The FTC later decided that it would not challenge the deal;[22] the Office of Fair Trading of the United Kingdom and the Israel Antitrust Authority also launched an investigation, in which the acquisition was ultimately unchallenged.[23][24][25] However, in 2020, the FTC announced that it would be re-examining Google's 2013 acquisition of Waze.[26]
Criticism[edit]
Concerns have been expressed that the app on smartphones can be used to monitor movements by identifiable individuals.[50] In December 2014, in a letter sent to Google, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck complained about the police locator feature, claiming it could be "misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community". It was alleged that Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who shot and killed two NYPD officers that month, had used the Waze app prior to the murders and had posted a screenshot from the app on his Instagram account hours before the shootings, but that was unsubstantiated as the post was made three weeks prior to the shootings.[51] Users are able to mark the presence of an officer with a small icon and indicate if the officer is visible or hidden. The LAPD, among other police agencies, pressured Google to disable the feature on the application. Google states that knowing the whereabouts of an officer promotes safer driving.[52][53]
Some road-safety advocates have voiced concern over the prospect of more drivers using Waze, which they say has the potential to distract them with a flurry of icons and notifications and put them at greater risk of an accident.[54]
Vulnerabilities[edit]
In 2016, researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create false traffic congestion events and to track the movements of Waze users. The attacks were based on weak location authentication, which allowed researchers to create software-based Sybil devices that reported fake traffic events and location data to the Waze servers and obtain information about nearby drivers in response.
[55]
In 2019, security researcher Peter Gasper reported two information disclosure vulnerabilities in the Waze Live Map, the web-based version of the navigation software.
One vulnerability allowed tracking of users using a unique identifier associated with the driver icon while the second vulnerability enabled partial de-anonymization of the users by recovering the username from the unique identifier. Google acknowledged and subsequently fixed the issue while paying out the bug bounty reward.[56]
Licensing[edit]
Waze Mobile Ltd holds several patents.[57][58][59] The Waze v2.x software was distributed under GNU General Public License v2, which did not extend to map data.[60] The base map data initially came from US Census Bureau TIGER data. FreeMap[61] data was not published under open content licenses even before the shift to Waze project. Ehud Shabtai who initiated and developed Freemap and Waze continuously insisted to crowdsource data without using external sources or projects like OpenStreetMap that would restrict commercialization of the Waze map data.[62]
Starting with Waze v3 the application was rewritten and as such switched to a proprietary license.[63] The last open-source client version for the iPhone and Android is 2.4.0.0, and for Windows Mobile 2.0.[64][65]
A class action suit was filed in March 2014 by accountant Roey Gorodish against Waze, claiming intellectual property violation for the use of open-source FreeMap map and code from the open-source RoadMap software,[66] a project that Ehud Shabtai had contributed for the Windows PocketPC version in 2006.[67][68][69] The lawsuit was dismissed on March 5, 2017 with a clear-cut decision that there was no basis for a class action suit in this case. The lawsuit was dismissed again with final verdict given by the Israeli Supreme Court on 28 January 2019.[70]