It's the middle of the 1990s. You're driving through a town you've never visited before, but you're not all that worried: you have a road map.
You turn to the left, following the tiny, inked lines on the giant paper map now unfolded on your passenger seat. According to this authoritative guide, you should be arriving at your destination in a few minutes.
Suddenly, the street names you’re seeing don’t match those on the map. You backtrack a few streets, try again, pull over, squinting at your map. You must have made a wrong turn. But no, you’ve followed the road names and turns on the map your entire voyage here, and this neighborhood is no exception.
Confused and irritated, you don’t realize that you’ve fallen victim to a trap street.
Trap streets are deliberate inaccuracies on maps, aimed not at helping you find your way, but at catching those who would copy the map unlawfully.
I can truly sympathize with the above story. Because of my decision to dive head-first into a life of entrepreneurship 30 years ago, ultimately leaving “work” behind after a decade in the restaurant business, I was constantly hustling and traveling, whether to a BJJ competition or seminar I was teaching.
Hundreds of thousands of non-GPS tracked miles meant puzzling over maps like these plenty of times.
I should perhaps clarify: I’m not sure I ever encountered a trap street in the wild, although I did get lost a lot. I’m also not sure there are any trap streets that really operate exactly like this; after all, their intention isn’t to get people lost. They want to catch people copying their map. Clearly, if another company passes the same mistake along, where it came from is pretty obvious.
Mapmakers had to be clever to protect their intellectual property, and trap streets served this purpose perfectly. By inserting a fictional street, a cartographer could easily identify unauthorized copies of their work, effectively serving as an analog watermark in a world yet to be digitized.
In our digital age, the trap street concept has evolved to adapt to new forms of media. Enter the honeypot in cybersecurity, a system set up to act like a trap for would-be hackers. These traps are designed to catch would-be hackers and attackers, presenting them with an irresistible target.
DALL-E 3, an image generator I use every day, embeds invisible watermarks into the images it produces. To the average user, these digital markings are invisible and inconsequential. But for those attempting to claim the AI's work as their own, the watermark serves as a modern-day trap street, revealing the origin of the image immediately.
This sort of idea goes back a long, long time. In the ancient world, coins were meticulously crafted with complex designs as a deterrent against counterfeiting. As we gradually moved into the age of paper currency, the concept remained the same but the medium changed. Watermarks started appearing in official documentation and paper money during the middle ages.
I remember the hidden features of the US dollar being revealed to me as a kid. I would trace the spider’s web until I saw the little spider hiding in the top corner.
Gen Z, this is the sort of thing we did before the internet. We stared at pieces of paper for hours at a time.
Over time, these clever physical ploys became clever digital ploys, and here we are today.
Human ingenuity is such an interesting arms race: it accelerates because people are trying to steal, and other people try to do their best to protect what they have. This contest continues to unfold in the digital age, but it’s far from a modern phenomenon.
This age-old game of cat and mouse continues, reminding us that as technology evolves, so do the clever methods we devise to protect our ideas.
What are some “trap streets” out there you can think of?
A fascinating, beautifully crafted post. I guess a kind of trap street would be those contracts that add an odd detail in a clause, to see if people are reading it. For example, a performer asking for 100 green m&ms in their changing room. The idea was If the venue doesn't query this or comply, they apparently don't read contracts carefully.
What a great post! Never heard of these traps before. Learned something new. Also 'Gen Z, this is the sort of thing we did before the internet' made me choke on a grape.😂