Looking for a new insurance provider, we can discount your policy if you use this monitor tracking thing, said often on the interstate I am 10 to 15 mph over just to keep up with traffic. Now I know why I see such white knuckle drivers going the speed limit. Big Brother go away!
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IMO GPS traffic services track vehicles and not people. Someone tracking you or me is what I was asking about. I recall reading in the newspaper about the police placing GPS trackers on cars driven by people suspected of drug trafficking. Cases were thrown out unless a court issued warrant was produced at trial. It seems to me that this is where metadata is collected and not personally identifiable information.
Third parties can’t. Police can with a warrant and the help of the persons phone carrier. There are apps that you can install on your childs phone for tracking.
Traffic data on apps is NOT collected from cell-phones - unless it’s an app like WAZE where the user can input traffic situations directly in the app. Some areas have cameras and or sensors in critical areas. The whole route from where NH to Boston is monitored with sensors and cameras. This data can be read from Google Maps and WAZE and other apps.
Nope:
“Beginning in 2009, Google turned to crowdsourcing to improve the accuracy of its traffic predictions. When Android phone users turn on their Google Maps app with GPS location enabled, the phone sends back bits of data, anonymously, to Google that let the company know how fast their cars are moving. Google Maps continuously combines the data coming in from all the cars on the road and sends it back by way of those colored lines on the traffic layers”
I’m not concerned about anonymous data as long as it remains anonymous.
A man placed 99 phones in a red wagon and pulled it down empty streets to give the indication of heavy traffic on Google Maps.
An Artist Used 99 Phones to Fake a Google Maps Traffic Jam | WIRED
Simon Weckert noticed something unusual at a May Day demonstration in Berlin: Google Maps showed there was a massive traffic jam, even though there were zero cars on the road. Soon enough, Weckert realized that it was the mass of people, or more specifically their smartphones, that had inadvertently tricked Google into seeing gridlock on an empty street.
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That’s ONLY if you turn on google maps.
Exactly. So traffic data is collected from cell phones.
It’s NOT the normal way. And ONLY when someone is using google maps. If no one is using Google Maps in that area then there is ZERO data to gather from the phone. And ONLY Google maps app can use it. WAZE and Apple Phone maps do NOT get their data from the phone.
Of course they do. Where else do you think the data comes from? Small roads show traffic, how else? And Google owns Waze, they share data. Waze also uses user input, but not just user input.
Google maps depending on your permissions can use your location access at anytime, on my Maps permissions under locations you have 3 choices,
A) Allow all the time…
B) Allow only while using the app…
C) Deny…
I have camera, contacts, mic and storage all denied on Maps app… but it has my location on all the time just incase…
Nothing worse than clicking on Maps with your GPS turned off, you will end up in BFE somewhere, ask me how I know… lol
That permission is for the app communicating with you specifically about your route, destination, etc. The app send your location anonymously any time it is open, just like Apple Maps:
From the Apple web site:
“Routing and Traffic: While you are in transit (for example, walking or driving), your iPhone will periodically send GPS data, travel speed and direction, and barometric pressure information in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple , to be used for augmenting crowd-sourced road traffic, roadway, pedestrian walkway, …”
Floating car data/Floating cellular data used for traffic mapping:
Floating cellular data
Floating cellular data is one of the methods to collect floating car data. This method uses [cellular network] data (CDMA, GSM, UMTS, GPRS). No special devices/hardware are necessary: every switched-on mobile phone becomes a traffic probe and is as such an anonymous source of information. The location of the mobile phone is determined using (1) triangulation or (2) the hand-over data stored by the network operator. As GSM localisation is less accurate than GPS based systems, many phones must be tracked and complex algorithms used to extract high-quality data. For example, care must be taken not to misinterpret cellular phones on a track near the road as incredibly fast journeys along the road.
I’m quite sure they don’t get that much traffic information from crowd source. Here in the Boston area and many others there are traffic monitoring devices that data is shared to google and apple and other maps. Apple and google does NOT rely strictly on their user phones to for traffic data. You are right that they do collect the data, but it’s unreliable to be thee only source. It is getting better.
How does Apple Maps get traffic data? (studycountry.com)
Waze and google rely more on the crowd source info, but there’s debate on it’s real-time accuracy. But from my experience it is better. They also do get a lot of information from information gathering devices. Especially for things like construction and traffic routing.