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Navigation App Sends People Looking to Get Tested to Family Farm

While navigation apps are most of the time pretty accurate, errors do tend to happen. In some cases, they could end up becoming fatal for the drivers who follow their guidance blindly.
Drivers sent to the man's farm because of a postcode issue 1 photo
Photo: Crutchfield
A farm owner in North Yorkshire complains that a navigation app whose name hasn’t been disclosed is sending people looking to get tested for the new virus to his property instead of the center that’s a few hundred yards up the road.

And of course, because they can’t find the testing center, many of these people get out of the car and ask for directions, so the farm owner is afraid he could eventually get infected too.

These people could all be potentially positive and be bringing the virus into our yard with them. They could be infected for all we know and we don’t want them on our farm. I am the only worker on the farm - if I fall ill it's a disaster,” the 63-year-old farm owner Gerald Towers told The Sun.

So what caused the mix-up? By the looks of things, it’s all because of the testing center is set up in the car park at the Kirkleatham Walled Garden located next to the farm, with wrong postcode information sending people to the man’s address.

I am told there is no answer to the postcode issue. The only one they can use leads sat navs to my front door. People who arrive are obviously distracted by worries about having the virus and they might not know the area. So they blindly follow their sat nav which sees them coming up into our farm and getting out to open the gate or winding their windows down to ask for directions,” Towers explained.

Local authorities say they can’t do much right now, though they did install additional signs on the side of the road to help drivers find the testing center.

The farmer himself created a series of signs of his own in an attempt to send people to the correct location, explaining that even workers of the testing center sometimes ended up on his property.
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About the author: Bogdan Popa
Bogdan Popa profile photo

Bogdan keeps an eye on how technology is taking over the car world. His long-term goals are buying an 18-wheeler because he needs more space for his kid’s toys, and convincing Google and Apple that Android Auto and CarPlay deserve at least as much attention as their phones.
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