G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost

Around two years ago, Shachar Maidenbaum, a neuroscientist who studies spatial navigation at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel, drove north with his children to visit a friend. He was following his location on G.P.S., using the Waze app for directions, when an automated voice suddenly told him to turn left and drive roughly two hundred miles south. “I thought, What? I’m driving north. What’s going on?,” he told me. “Then I realized: my phone thinks I’m in Beirut.” Israel often jams G.P.S. signals as a military strategy, and in recent years it has employed “spoofing,” a technique that sends fake location data to G.P.S.-enabled devices.