Can Google be held legally responsible for bad directions?

“Use caution — This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”


Punch a pair of addresses into Google Maps and ask for walking directions between them, and Google will warn you of the above, noting that its walking directions are in beta.

And that’s because these walking directions (like many driving directions) aren’t always the best. But while bad driving directions are often just an inconvenience that may cost you a few extra minutes, tell someone to walk on the wrong road and you could very well be sending them into harm’s way.

That’s exactly what happened to a woman named Lauren Rosenberg last January, when she typed an address into her BlackBerry, asked for walking directions, and was ultimately led onto a busy highway with no sidewalks. She was promptly hit by a car and is now suing Google (and the driver of the car who ran her over) for six figures.

While the question of whether the driver is responsible for the incident is a matter of facts on the ground, the more interesting legal issue here is whether Google can be held responsible for sending Rosenberg onto that road to begin with.
Rosenberg says that the roadway she was directed to walk on “is not reasonably safe for pedestrians” and that she should never have been directed to walk along that street.

Take a look at the photo of it for yourself at the above link (scroll down about halfway). It’s not a thoroughfare I’d advise any pedestrian to spend time on, and God help you if you have to cross to the other side.

The case is a surprisingly tricky one. Yes, Rosenberg should have used common sense when venturing out on foot, but it’s arguable that anyone seeking directions like this probably doesn’t know anything about where they’re going. Could Rosenberg have known that a safer street was just a block away? Or might she have assumed that it could be even more dangerous? Should she have gone exploring in a foreign area to find a better path? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do think a jury could reasonably find that if a service is going to offer walking directions, that those directions should be as safe as possible — or else the service shouldn’t offer the directions to begin with.

It’s also worth noting that the disclaimer you get with Google's walking directions on the Web doesn’t show up on most portables.

What say ye? Who’s at fault here? Rosenberg? Google? Or both?

By: Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.