Traffic data to eventually be offered for all roads in the U.S.
Tracking the movements of a user with a GPS-enabled smartphone is an easy enough task for application developers to accomplish. The tracking feature is commonly used in navigation applications and other types of software. Palm recently found itself in some hot water over tracking detailed user information including where the user is located.
Google is talking up its maps application and the apps ability to use the location and speed data from a users phone to make a crowdsourced traffic map for an entire city.
Google says that this week it has expanded its traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and roads when data is available. Google points out that for the service to be truly useful, it needs lots of participants. As Google puts it, by simply turning on the crowdsourcing feature of the maps application users can get a real time image of how well traffic is moving on a given roadway.
One of the big concerns with any application that tracks user's movements is whether a specific device can be located. Google says that on all the data it collects, it takes the starting and ending point data and deletes it. That means that even Google has no access to the data to be able to locate a specific device.
To make things even more private and secure, when there is data from multiple devices available Google will combine all the data and present it in bulk. Owners of the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre already have Google Maps and the crowdsourcing feature installed, they only need to enable it. The Google maps application for the iPhone lacks the crowdsourcing feature.
Google says that despite the protections it puts in place to protect the user location data, those wishing to opt out of the crowdsourcing feature can do so easily.
