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Project Turns GPS Phones Into Traffic Reporters

Posted by timothy on from the then-it's-mandatory dept.

narramissic writes "Starting on Monday, researchers from Nokia and UC Berkeley will kick off the Mobile Millennium project. The researchers hope that thousands of volunteers will download a free Java program that figures out by their movement and location when they are driving, and then transmits that information to the project's servers, which then crunch it into a Bay Area traffic map. 'The whole concept here is that if everyone shares just a little bit of what they're seeing ... then everyone can benefit by seeing the conditions ahead of them,' said Quinn Jacobson, a research leader with Nokia in Palo Alto."

3 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah but Helicopter crashes are more entertaining by cavehobbit · · Score: 5, Funny

    Come on. Don't they know the reason we all listen to the half-hour-out-of-date traffic reports from the helicopter reporters is the same as why we watch Nascar and Indy car races? The chances of a crash and the anticipation of mayhem are the whole idea. Not to mention the cheesy chopper sound track they add.

    This takes all that out of it. It guarantees a daily fender-bender on I-95 while drivers fiddle with the app. Whoop-de-doo.

    Well, maybe if they keep the chopper sound effects.

  2. Who would be dumb enough to download this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    *considers existence of FaceBook*

    Nevermind.

  3. Re:The privacy post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's no problem. The idea is that you benefit from the information which emerges from the aggregated data. Kind of like other community projects, for example CDDB or Wikipedia. You feed a small piece of information into the system and get the service of the whole system back.

    The thing to watch out for is: Who owns the data? Are you really just jumpstarting a commercial enterprise which will later turn the free service into a product or serve your data back to you with ads, while you are forbidden to use the database for your own purposes?