Trying to answer the perilous question why they were storing cell phone tower data to begin with in their response to the iPhone tracking furor earlier today, Apple has disclosed a future product: a crowd-sourced database, using iPhone users as a way to determine arterial congestion… of the traffic variety, not circulatory.
What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.
Sounds good to me, provided it is opt-in.
[via MacRumors]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
10 responses to “Apple Wants To Use iPhones To Crowd-Source New Traffic Service”
Or are they talking about cellular network traffic?
so only after they are caught collecting historical location data do they are admit to collecting traffic data, it’s time for the government to step in. this is a violation of privacy that I didn’t consent to.
If it were optional, how then would it be of any use if most people opted-out? Seems to me this new feature should either be non-optional or be scrapped altogether.
But I must say that the media and end users get too bent out of shape over this stuff. Privacy is and long has been an illusion. Understand it. Get over it. Move on with life.
I don’t sense a lick of sincerity in your post. You sound just like the drum beaters from the days when cookies were considered a massive breach of privacy.
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