The New York City Subway Is Using Google Pixels to Listen for Track Defects

Between September and January, six Google Pixel smartphones hitched free rides on four New York City subway cars. Specifically, they took the A train, as it ping-ponged the 32 miles between the northern tip of Manhattan and the southern reaches of Queens. The phones weren’t stowaways or strays, and an extremely sharp-eyed passenger could tell because they were inside plastic enclosures and secured via brackets to the cars’ undersides and interiors. While people inside the cars used their smartphones to write emails or scroll Instagram or explore Roblox, the subway operators were using these phones’ sensors—accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyroscopes, and for those attached to the cars’ exteriors, additional external microphones—to listen intently. The phones were part of a brief experiment by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Google into whether cheap, mostly off-the-shelf technology could supplement the agency’s track inspection work. (Google Public Sector, ... Read full article.