Google Maps will now tell you how busy a certain area in the map is by labelling it as a “Busy area”. When you open the updated app, it will show the busy places around your location with the tag of “Busy area”. This can come in useful if you are planning a visit to that area or going to cross that one when enroute to another location.
Tap on the “Busy area” label and it will bring up a chart that details how busy the area is going to be at different points in the day. It will also show the restaurants, shops and other notable places around that location, and with photos to help you get a lay of the land, quite literally.
“We combine live busyness trends from places in an area, like stores, restaurants, parks, cafes, and more to determine its overall busyness level. These trends indicate how busy an area typically is – and when it’s near or at its busiest we highlight it as a “Busy Area” on Google Maps. To protect our users’ privacy, our systems don’t calculate busyness information for residential places like a house or apartment,”, says Google on its support page.
Google says that it has put several protective measures in place for the communities. For example, area busyness will keep the location of an individual a secret with the help of a feature Google calls “differential privacy”. Also, area busyness will never display the total number of people in an area. Also the busyness is determined on the basis of a predefined “area of interest”; it won’t “display exactly where a crowd is within it.” Google has also assured the users that it wouldn’t collect area busyness data about residential places.