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?

[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.

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.