A Rival Traffic App Is Suing Waze For Allegedly Poaching Its Database

PhantomAlert claims it buried fake points of interest in its database to shield against copying—and that Waze has those same markers.

Before the advent of GPS and navigation apps, cartographers sneaked "paper towns" and "trap streets" into their maps—fake points of interest that they used to detect plagiarism. If someone copied their map, it would be easily identifiable through the inclusion of those locations. That same trick has found its way into modern-day mapping systems: A new lawsuit brought against Google and its traffic app Waze cites sham points of interest as evidence that the Google-owned service copied from a competitor's database.

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