Crowdsourcing: relying on the kindness of strangers

 The colonial pipeline shutdown has really shook Asheville, panic buying hit big time last week. No gasoline for sale within 20 miles of where I live. Even my entitled self that doesn’t depend on my car to get to work is a tad worried. 

But that’s not why I decided to blog about it. I’ve been using gasbuddy’s outage map, it appears to rely on humanoids reporting if a gas station has gas available, but it’s pretty naive about accepting devious human input as being all truthy. For instance, I ran a test and it let me as a devious unauthenticated anonymous user report that a station 10 miles away had gas. With the current outage and panic, the gas station I changed was fairly quickly changed back to reporting no gas as soon as someone who showed up at the station reported the station was in fact sold out. 

What they should do is only accept as valid a authenticated user (in theory we cheat/lie less when we aren’t anonymous), and only accept a users update from a cell phone whose gps is close to the gas station. I shouldn’t be able to report gas in stock in Tennessee if I’m in North Carolina.

What would be cool in a gps tracking privacy devoid world is that the availability and wait time for gas could be tracked with no crowdsourcing of human input. If gasbuddy users gps devices aren’t ever stopping at a gas station, it must be out of gas. If every user that stops is spending roughly 10 minutes at the gas station, they probably have gas (or a sale on Doritos), and it’s a short wait. If there are tons more users hanging out by the gas station than normal, and they are all spending 90 minutes there, you could estimate the wait to be a long one. 

It will be nice to see these dots go green, and deep apologies to the gasbuddy user that got suckered by my devious test.