RSSGoogle Maps for Mobile users become traffic beacons
By Tim Conneally | Published August 25, 2009, 12:30 PM
This week, Google is expanding the traffic layer in Google Maps to cover all US highways, and to determine the flow of traffic, its own users are anonymously supplying the data.
In Google Maps for Mobile with "My Location," phones with GPS (excluding iPhones) send their speed data to Google so it can determine the overall speed at which traffic is flowing. Traffic flow is not uploaded in a social way. That is to say, a single user does not simply flick on his GPS to show other users that he's stuck in traffic. Rather, Google pulls the speed data off of every phone with Google Maps and GPS and combines it to arrive at an average.
"We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start," Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps wrote in the company's blog today.
"We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone," Barth continued. "We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went -- so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data -- but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate."
This will definitely make some people very uneasy and have the anti-google folks foaming at the mouth.
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|Sorry many of you seem to be so dead-set against this, but if we're ever to have smart-cars/smart-roads, this*is* the direction in which we will need to go.
Roadside counters and "radar" are great for flow-monitoring, but just don't cut it in terms of prediction or control. GPS nav telling a massive distributed network where your vehicle will be 5 minutes from now is the only way we'll ever get from point A to point B without "driving".
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|Too bad the Dash GPS unit is not available in the USA anymore. Google's idea needs to be used on every dedicated GPS unit that's capable of getting traffic info.
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|An exactly why would I want my speed info sent to google constantly. So I can get a virtul gTicket or iTicket (depending on the device) that will cost me non virtul cash. It's only a matter of time before some municipality and some sleezy (traffic monitoring) company come together and here you go. It will happen, just like traffic cameras sprung up. Maybe this will lead to getting a ticket when you trade in your phone. The "average" speed of an "average" person can be determined over a given time and if you exceed that "average" they can assume that you were speeding and fine you. We never saw the economy crash coming, so I gusee we can just assume unlimited data collection is ok too.
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|um, Google is a private company....
and I don't see why traffic cameras are a bad thing either...unless you don't like having people get caught for speeding and possibly endangering others' lives?
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|The problem is that the police don't hand out enough tickets. People need to be ticketed even if they're going just 1 mph over the speed limit. The law is the law.
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|So you basically don't want to follow the law and don't like to be policed?
Do you understand that policing people so hard as it is lately is needed because of people like you?!
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|In Praise of Traffic Tickets: Don't roll your eyes. They're good for you in more ways than you think.
http://www.slate.com/id/2226509/?yahoo=y
"Here we encounter the general and long-standing reluctance in the United States to consider traffic violations to be "real" crime. Instead, as sociologist H. Laurence Ross has observed, they tend to be regarded as "folk crimes": seemingly lesser acts of "everyday deviance," perhaps victimless, perhaps white-collar, perhaps the type committed by people you know."
"One often hears, in cases like this, comments along the lines of "his guilty conscience will be punishment enough." But ex post facto regret is worthless from the perspective of public health, which seeks preventative measures to stop people from dying."
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|Anyone else just figure out why the google phones battery doesn't last long at all... Very interesting stuff.
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|You're already using the feature for my location so no additional battery usage is needed. Just don't use Google Maps or the GPS if you want your battery to last longer.
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