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Traffic App Waze To Alert L.A. Drivers of Kidnappings and Hit-and-Runs
An anonymous reader writes: Traffic-alert app Waze has announced a partnership with Los Angeles to share information on hit-and-runs and kidnappings taking place across the city, alongside traffic data and road closure updates. The deal forms part of a data-sharing agreement between L.A. authorities and the Google-owned tech startup detailed yesterday by the city's mayor Eric Garcetti. He assured that the data provided to the city by Waze would be "aggregated" and completely anonymous. According to the councillor the collaboration was mutually confirmed on Monday following a "very good meeting" between Waze and LAPD chief officer Charlie Beck. This move signals a considerable turn of events after Beck argued at the end of last year that the traffic alert app posed a danger to police due to its ability to track their location. The complaint followed the shooting of two police officers in New York after the shooter used the app to track his targets.
Someone seems to have forgotten you can legally use your cell phone as a GPS.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
He assured that the data provided to the city by Waze would be "aggregated" and completely anonymous
It'd be way too easy to combine this "aggregated" intelligence with what "smart" traffic sensors already know to de-anonymize pretty much every piece of data.
Sorry, but with ALL of the ties to an individual (billing, address, Google, Apple, etc.) that your personal cell phone has (also known as the exclusive device Waze runs on), you're not going to convince me for one second that any data streaming from my cell phone is "anonymous".
No fucking way.
If more people realized this, we would call out these "aggregated" and "metadata" justifications for what they are; complete and total bullshit.
The numbers of fatal accidents has been decreasing the past thirty years. Cell phones have had no noticeable statistical effect.