Tom Tom Sells GPS Info To Dutch Cops

jfruhlinger writes "As smartphones with GPS capabilities wear away at the dedicated GPS market, vendors like Tom Tom need to find new revenue streams. Tom Tom decided it would be a good idea to 'share' (i.e., sell) aggregated data from their users to Dutch law enforcement. The company claims they assumed that the data would be used to improve traffic safety and road engineering, and were shocked, shocked to discover that instead the police used it to figure out the best places to put speed traps."

Comments

Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did this story come from the Department of Redundancy Department?

Re:Again?

[cpu6502]

>>>finding ways to boost their revenue than to protect the public.

I'm one of those who thinks the LAW needs to be changed, not the enforcement. i.e. Go ahead and put cameras on redlights and all along highways. Catch lots of people speeding. And then change the law to be more reasonable, such as 85 on the interstate (which is actually designed to handle 120 per the original Congressional act). Setting speeds artificially low at 65 or 55, when everyone is driving 80, and the road engineers recommend 80, makes no sense.

Re:Again?

[dgatwood]

It does no good to lower the death rate as a percentage of accidents by lowering the speed limit if that in turn results in an increase in the rate of accidents. The probability of a risk is dependent largely on the difference in speed between the slowest and fastest vehicles, so by setting the limit too low, you're not necessarily helping.

Want to lower the death rates? Raise the standards for automobile crash safety. Any other method of achieving such gains is almost invariably illusory. When cars are unnecessarily out on the road because of congestion caused by too-low speed limits, you're adding pollution that statistically kills people, too. It's just a lot harder to measure that causation.

Besides, the safety issues for the users have been dramatically improved since the 1970s, to such an extent that if 65 MPH roads were safe in the 1970s, a 100 MPH road is safe by that safe standard today. Yet speed limits have not increased. Thus, the position that speed limits are set based on safety simply cannot be justified in light of the evidence at hand.

The only good justification for a low speed limit is a large amount of pedestrian traffic, and only because they don't have cars to protect them in a collision. For highways, for maximum safety, the speed limit should be set at a speed that is safe for the road, and should be on electronic signs so they can lower it if road conditions are bad. And it should be set high enough that anyone exceeding it is clearly nuts.

Re:Again?

[Everyone Is Seth]

Yay, math!

In other news, did you know that, as impact speed increases from 5 mph to 25 mph, the energy that needs to be managed increases by 2400 percent!? That is just stunning! I think that we must start considering the children here, and lower all speed limits to 5 mph immediately. And ban driving in parking lots. With all of the obstructed views, it is just too dangerous, and I am not going to be held responsible for teaching my children about running into streets blindly.

Re:Again?

[sjames]

Evidence suggests that no matter what the posted speed, people will drive exactly as fast as they feel safe driving. Unfortunately, they may feel safer than they actually are and that's where the trouble starts. Measures that make a road feel less safe inevitably cause people to slow down. The only thing the posted limit changes is the size and number of tickets.

Repost

[ThePolkapunk]

Yes. We know. It was addressed last week: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/04/28/1719247/GPS-Maker-TomTom-Submits-Your-Speed-Data-To-Police

Re:Repost

[QuasiSteve]

Repost indeed.

Also, just to recap the actual events...

TomTom asks users if they would like to share 'anonymous' (since leaving place X and returning there every weekday is kinda indicatory) traffic information with TomTom in order to improve services. The fine print says that TomTom can also make this information available to 3rd parties.

One of those 3rd parties is a research company. They take datasets and provide condensed reports based on them.

One of the reports they generated revealed either A. where people were speeding or B. simply what speed people were driving. Not individual users - just a breakdown of numbers. N data points, X% of those N > 120kph, Y% between 100kph and 120kph, etc.

This report is what the police apparently use to decide that if every day there's 1,000 people going 140 where they're only supposed to go 100 (arguments of whether 140 is safe etc. is another story), they should place some speed traps there.. be that to make a safer situation, as a cashcow, or simply because they felt like annoying the speeding drivers.

That's it. There wasn't a direct line from TomTom to the police. In addition, that same information is used by the government to determine if perhaps an extra lane should be added, or whether the speed limit should actually be increased (it's usually environment/noise regulations that limit roads to a certain speed).

Now TomTom, pretty much pandering to their audience (the ones that download speed trap location POI's being pretty much the majority) by saying they're going to adjust the terms of use of the datasets so the police couldn't do what they did anymore.

I have no idea how TomTom thinks they're gonna do that, given that they have no direct relationship with the police -and- the data can be used for perfectly good things as well. Tell the research company they can only sell on the distilled information to the government if they include a clause that the police can't use this information to place speed traps?
What if one of the research companies simply dumps the average speed on major roads as a picture or google maps data on the internet. Now what - that picture/google maps information needs a clause saying "If you're a cop, you can't use this information"?

Hence the 'pandering to their audience'. There's pretty much nothing they could actually do to halt the use of information for purposes that their customers aren't too keen on, other than simply not selling the data at all.

Re:good

[MikeDirnt69]

Cars that kill people? You mean Christine?

There's no difference.

[_0xd0ad]

The company claims they assumed that the data would be used to improve traffic safety and road engineering, and were shocked, shocked to discover that instead the police used it to figure out the best places to put speed traps.

Well duh. Those two phrases mean exactly the same thing in the newspeak.

Re:The best place to put speed traps?

[Cwix]

I know that some towns in the US really rely on income generated from tickets and fines. In which case they would want to place traps in places more likely to catch offenders

That is a large part of the problem right there. A lot of these towns love to use speed limits that jump up and down. There is a stretch of highway not far from me that goes from 55 to 25 to 35 to 25 to 35 to 45 all within about a mile stretch. Its blatant that its purpose is solely to catch drivers unfamiliar to the area. (Speeds in MPH)

Re:good

[PoopMonkey]

My dad worked with those engineers. What the parent posted is true. The majority of the speed limits you see are not what the engineers give for a road. The possible exceptions are neighborhoods.

Re:most speed traps are cash cows and not about sa

[asdf7890]

This argument is essentially "it isn't safe for me to drive at 55 when everyone else is moving at 75". It isn't unsafe because of the law or because the specified maximum speed is 55, it is unsafe because everyone else is breaking the law. That argument can be countered with the standard school teacher response of "if everyone else put their head in fire, would you?". If everyone is breaking the law then by all means charge everyone for it. If you think the speed limit set by law is wrong campaign to have it lifter rather than just ignoring it and breaking the law. The speed cameras would not be "cash cows" if people didn't routinely ignore the speed limits.

Speed limits are not only set for safety in some places. Studies have shown that most road systems, once above a certain % of their carrying capacity, are most efficient (both in terms of average journey time for those taking part in the system and in terms of fuel efficiency) when the maximum speed is set to a value most people would find surprisingly low. This is mainly due to the fact it means people keep a more constant speed, with far less accelerating simply because the speed limit is higher then having to slow down again at the next obstruction (lights, slower moving traffic ahead, turning off into a slower road). Without this constant speed variation in individual vehicles less fuel would be used and there would be less "bunching" which can cause havoc with road system efficiency (meaning average journey times, and fuel waste, rise). Of course for optimum efficiency the speed limit would need to be more dynamic than the current fixed limits, rising on straight stretches at times when the roads are clear to traffic can move freely and safely+efficiently at a higher pace - but would require significant infrastructure investment to implement so may be a pretty bad optimisation in short/medium term.

The debate about speed cameras in high speed areas is interesting. If they were just there for the safety aspect then there may be a case for their being less of them, but there is also a case for speed limits being lower for efficiency reasons in many areas and there would be no way to implement that without the cameras to keep an eye on people.

One place where I would like to see *more* cameras (perhaps moving some of those that are currently monitoring high-speed areas?) is in slower zones where the issue is very much safety. I expect that cameras policing the 15 and 20mph zones near schools, parks, and other quiet residential areas would draw in less cash but would make more of an impact in terms of lives saved and injuries lessened. I've often seen people shoot past a local school here at far more than the posted (but not enforced, aside from the very occasional bobby with a radar gun) 20mph limit - when I had my motor bike I would sometimes be in that flow of traffic and be getting bibbed by the idiot behind me because I was moving at 20ish rather than the 30+ he thought more appropriate. The really irritating thing is that some of the people speeding were speeding away after dropping off their kids at the school (I'm sure they'd complain pretty indignantly if one day their snotty little sprog was skittled by a car or bike that was moving faster than the limit). An efficiency issue would be addressed by this too: all to often you see people putting their foot down at one end of a short street only to slam on the breaks at the other end before they turn, which is probably more wasteful than pushing up from 55 to 75 and back down again.